World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls
(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill and Nardole, 24/6/2017-1/7/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Rachel Talalay)
Rank: 165
'Why are you hiding from me? Did I wake up as a Cyberman or something?...What do you mean I'm an Abrozabloff?!?'
It’s very nearly the end – and the moment had been prepared for well. But then the BBC asked for another Christmas episode and the next showrunner wasn’t quite ready. Even so, while Steven Moffat was writing this story and for the vast majority of the filming of it, this is farewell. And it’s a good farewell, a far better send off than ‘Time Of The Doctor’ had been for the 11th Doctor even though it must have been an even harder challenge to write. After all, no other script editor/showrunner had ever had to write in two regenerations and it’s impressive how different Moffat makes them even they are in theory quite similar and end with The Doctor in one place, surrounded by baddies waiting to attack while one of the good guys waits a long period for the end to come. ‘World Enough’ is more thought out though, darker, sadder, with more to say about life and death and endings and, despite the title, time.
The story came together
from different sources and Moffat being Moffat they came from family and
friends. The first was the fact that Moffat’s son Josh had just secured an
apprenticeship at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, via a
lucky accident (he attended a Christmas party with a CERN nuclear engineer who
picked up on what a bright lad he was and asked if he wanted to round it). Dad,
naturally curious about science, was fascinated too and asked lot of questions
about what they were researching. Josh mentioned that they were working on a
concept called ‘time dilation’, where clocks didn’t necessarily keep set time –
astronauts had known for decades that being in space affected how time worked
and even having time under observation, by simply staring at a clock, seemed to
affect them in some way. Mostly though it’s because of gravity and relates to
Einstein’s theory of general relativity where time varies depending how close
to a gravity source you are (something the scientists never got round to
mentioning during his brief Who appearances in both ‘Time
and the Rani’ and a schools competition entry, alas). To you it would look
‘normal’ but to a neutral observer far enough away they would see changes. Dad,
used to playing around with timey wimey stories, was thrilled: here was a whole
new twist to what he always liked doing best, treating time like an active
character in his storytelling. He came up with the idea of a black hole that
was exaggerating time, with a miles-wide spaceship heading towards it that
would be so vast that people on one level would experience time at an entirely
different speed to the people at the other end. The only question now was what
race could be living there? Should it be a new one or an old one?
Then, with the idea
orbiting his head, Moffat attended a Radio Times/BFI screening in 2017
alongside Peter Capaldi and Matt Lucas when a journalist asked something he’d
been asked many times before: ‘what monster would ou like to bring back?’
Capaldi didn’t hesitate: ‘Mondasian Cybermen’ he said ‘The original Human
Cybermen from ‘The 10th
Planet’. If only so that I get to say ‘Mondasian Cybermen’. Matt Lucas then
made a joke about how it could be a new spin-off show ‘Keeping Up With The
Mondasians’, everyone laughed and moved on. Everyone except Moffat, for the
Mondasian Cybermen fitted his spaceship idea. It would be part of their doomed
journey to their twin Earth, where a desperate race are trying to convert themselves
before time runs out. It would be a last treat for Capaldi too, like the man
sentenced to death who gets to choose his last meal, only it would be an actor
choosing their last monster. Moffat also idly thought that the early Cybermen
looked like burns victims and that might be grounds for drama.
Someone else Moffat bumped into at a convention shortly afterwards was John Simm. Naturally the actor was asked if he had any plans to come back to the show. ‘No’ the actor said honestly but then looked slyly at Moffat ‘But I’m always happy to get a call any time’ and made a joke about how he’d hoped the 50th special ‘Day Of the Doctor’ had featured a reunion of Masters as they were so much more interesting than a reunion of Doctors. He also added how much he’d been diving into the Master’s back story since being in the show and how he wished he’d kept his reputation for disguises in his incarnation. It was meant as a joke now that Missy was a whole new Master for a whole new wondering around, but Moffat also knew that Michelle Gomez had privately mentioned that she wanted to be written out as she wouldn’t feel right working with a different Doctor or writer and Moffat had been looking for someone important to force her regeneration that no one would be expecting. Why not her younger self? Big Finish had done multi-Master stories before but it had never been done on TV (not least because Roger Delgado had died so young and Anthony Ainley died before the comeback series, while Eric Roberts from the ‘TV Movie’ was over in Hollywood). But why not now? It would also show far Missy had come, as a ‘nicer’ Master if the old mad psychotic one was still running around. Things were taking shape.
Then tragedy struck:
Moffat’s mum got sick suddenly and had to be taken to hospital. With deadlines
looking Steven had no choice but to write his first drafts at her bedside,
while she was sleeping. Naturally enough his surroundings inspired the missing
part of the story, of the Mondasian patients dying and being converted in an
austere hospital (deliberately made to look like one of the cold clinical older
ones from the start of the 20th century rather than a modern one, so
it wouldn’t scare any children watching and about to have an operation who
might now worry that they would turn into a Cyberman!) There are lots of little
details that only someone who has spent a lot of time in hospitals would spot:
Bill woozily waking up not quite sure where she is, the patients calling out
for nurses because they’re in ‘pain’ saying the words over and over to
themselves, the corridors full of patients waiting to be seen in a daze, the
tight-lipped matron and the creepy caretaker who are the only people who know
their way around but won’t pass on what’s happening, the little kitchen where
strangers are squashed together awkwardly making small talk, the way that being
in a hospital feels like being escorted to an alien planet. Even the thought of
putting your life in the hands of strangers, who have suddenly become the most
important people in the world even though you never knew they existed until
something goes wrong and the fact that you have to trust them, that you have no
choice. Time, too, works differently in hospitals, especially for patients
drifting in and out of consciousness. Your usual timetable has gone, the
artificial lights and the repetition mean it’s hard to tell if it’s day or
night, though a new timetable full of rules has come into force to replace your
old one, long periods of boredom punctuated by sudden bursts of action when
patients fall really sick. Bill too is told she can never leave the spaceship
because she’ll never outside it, like an end of care patient tied up to one
last machine and looking sadly out the windows at the old life they used to
take for granted. Meanwhile the people on the ‘outside’ continue to live their
lives as ‘normal’, in ‘real time’, something that seems like a distant memory
to patients. The idea, too, was raised by Tom MacRae in his story ‘The Girl Who Waited’ in Moffat’s first year
as showrunner but here was a golden opportunity to do it with Cybermen, with
the viewer’s fore-knowledge of what was happening. Moffat was also inspired by
two earlier stories (well one more of a storyboard really) Gerry Davies’
‘Genesis Of The Cybermen’ from 1974 (given a namecheck here) and the Big Finish
story ‘Spare Parts’ which covered a lot of the same ground, but back on Mondas
rather than in a spaceship.
On the plus side these
story elements give ‘World Enough and Time’ an epic grandeur worthy of a
finale. By and large the Doctor regenerates either because he’s trying to save
a whole population (the way he sort of does in ‘10th Planet’) or because
he’s trying to save a companion (such as Peri in ‘Caves
Of Androzani’, Rose in ‘Parting Of
The Ways’ or Wilf in ‘The End Of Time’).
Very occasionally he dies while trying to save his soul in a more profound,
existential sense (‘Planet Of Spiders’
and to a certain extent ‘Logopolis’).
For one story only he dies trying to do all three. The Doctor’s fight to save
the Mondasians from being converted is doomed. We know it’s doomed because with
all those Cybermen stories nobody ever mentions the Mondasians that got away.
The Doctor does it anyway though because it’s the right thing to do. It’s the
perfect end to his story arc which has been running three seasons now, of
whether he is a ‘good man’. Because of course he is. Unequivocally and
irrevocably. The Doctor sees suffering and can’t walk away even if he knows he
can’t do anything about it. So Capaldi gets one last great wonderful speech –
the highlight of his tenure, alongside the similar ‘war’ one in ‘Zygon Invasion/Inversion’ - about doing the right thing simply because it
is the right thing, even when it’s doomed. It’s such a Dr Who speech, fierce
and fiery but calm and intelligent, accepting that life is complex but that
choices are often simple, between good and evil. The Doctor makes a stand
because to do anything else is wrong, even when he knows it will kill him. In
this way he finally ‘saves’ himself and puts his fears to bed that he’s going
to end up like The War Doctor and not be a proper Doctor anymore. It gives him
salvation and finality (which makes the coda leading into the next story, seem
jarring and out of place: he’s accepted his death graciously in a way the last
two refused, realising that everything has a time – yes that word again). Missy
too gets to be seen to do the right thing, going behind the Simm Master’s back
to secretly work with The Doctor, even if tragically he never knows it because
they shoot each other in the back before they get there. It’s the perfect end
to all their individual ‘stories’ and a worthy end to Dr 12, Missy and Mondas.
Even Nardole, the comic relief as Missy calls him, gets a hero’s end, in charge
of a group of children with a potential romance on the way.
As for ‘exposition’, I
still can’t tell if Bill’s story is the single best bit of writing Moffat did
or a betrayal. You see Bill’s always been the unluckiest of companions If
something bad happens it always happens to Bill. She’s the loneliest of all
companions, one who ends up with The Doctor because she’s desperate for a
connection and can’t find one with anyone else – her mum is dead, her adopted
family don’t seem to get on with her, her flatmates are all weird and/all eaten
by their rented flat (see ‘Knock Knock’)
and even the first girlfriend she ever had turned into a puddle and flew away
after a single date (‘The Pilot’). All
she wants is love and someone she can rely on. And yet she never complains: she
always maintains an enduring faith in The Doctor that he will ‘save’ her and
make her life better, whether at university, on an alien planet or in the
distant future. It’s been a close run thing most of the time but so far The
Doctor has always fulfilled his promise to keep her safe. A promise he
reiterates in flashback in this adventure as they sit eating their lunch
together. But then it all goes wrong. Bill gets shot by a jumpy technician,
Jorje, who knows The Cybermen are after Humans. The Doctor tries to save her,
but such is time on board ship that it takes him ten years to reach her. Moffat
teases us that she’s still alive, just bored and that it’s all going to be
fine. And then he misses her by two hours. Bill becomes everything she feared
she was already, a Cyberman that everyone treats as ‘different’ and everyone is
scared of her. Bill, the girl who just wants to be loved, is further away from
love than ever. Some fans even see an extra metaphor in here, that her being
pushed to the margins of society, made to sleep in a barn so she doesn’t scare
children and where everyone sees her for someone she’s not. A lot of the black
and a lot of the LGBTQ community really took to this idea: we now Bill is one
of the kindest people you could ever meet (she’s even understanding of people’s
reactions when she’s a Cyberman for the most part) but people don’t see that,
they see their prejudices and assumptions about her. Very clever camerawork
switches from Bill as she sees herself (normal) and how other people see her (a
threat) while The Doctor, rather sweetly, looks down at her as if she’s still
five foot something even when the camera shows her as a Cyberman; it’s a clever
subtle metaphor that says a lot more than being direct ever could, certainly
compared to the spoonfed Chibnall lectures waiting in the wings. Equally Bill
is held to different standards now: she’s not allowed to get angry even though
she has every reason in the universe, because that only makes her seem scarier
(One of the best lines is when the Simm Master tries to wind Bill up and she
tells him I’m not upset’ for him to put and leave, ‘Well doesn’t that take all
the fun out of cruelty?’) It’s like the Martin Luther King civil rights movement
of the 1960s: be peaceful, because they’re looking for an excuse to say you’re
aggressive. It’s the single best and worst possible thing Moffat could do to
Bill, breaking her spirit and all the trust left in her while at the same time
turning one of the most freely emotional and expressive of companions into a
cybernetic robot (Bill is always getting her heart broken metaphorically; this
time it’s physical). He even has her trust betrayed again, after a decade
living with ‘Razor’ just to rub it in (a great twist, though for once I saw it
coming. Moffat based it on the one in ‘Castrovalva’
which had always stayed with him, one which I didn’t see coming). The ending,
with Bill crying over The Doctor’s dead body, is one of the most harrowing
scenes in all of Who (and very much Moffat channelling his grief over his mum.
At last all those years of ‘everybody lives!’ have caught up with him and the
two characters who represent his ‘voice’ are either dead or dying. It’s
gloriously bleak and uncompromising, the opposite of everything we assumed
would happen for Bill when we met her. Then girlfriend Heather turns up from
outer space, arriving out of her tears (and solving a plot point from the start
of the season) and turns her into a spiritual bit of ectoplasm free to fly
across space. For most – heck any other – companion a cerebral ball of light in
the form of a puddle turning up would be the silliest ending of all, but it
works for Bill wh finally gets the love she always craved, twelve episode late
and after giving up hope for what might well have been the first time in her
life. Though some fans feel this ending is grafted on out of nowhere (and is
itself undone by having Bill return as a hologram in ‘Twice
Upon A Time’) it works: right when Bill has finally given up all hope
something good happens and she finds the love she’s always craved. It’s a
beautiful bit of writing: every character gets redemption, even in death.
Unfortunately on the
minus having all these nuggets of ideas from different sources means that
Moffat is writing a script that’s forever having to patch over the cracks with
ideas that bump into each other as they rub shoulders rather than slot together
neatly and it leaves a lot more plotholes than a writer as meticulous as Moffat
usually leaves, with characters acting very unlike themselves at times. Characters
come and go without knowing what happens to them: Jorje, for instance, just
disappears when the plot doesn’t need him and simply isn’t with the others when
they try and catch up with Bill. Nobody seems at all puzzled that Razor, who
has been on the staff for a decade, now looks different (and not in a
cybernetic kind of a way). There’s no
way, for instance, that a race as technologically superior as Mondas and with
the ability to create a spaceship as big as this would be daft enough to head
into a black hole without noticing the effects first. It’s hard to tell what
The Mondasians are doing at all: they can’t be heading to their twin planet
Earth as we don’t have any black holes in our solar system. If they are doing
this at some point shortly before 1980 (our time, when ‘The 10th Planet’ is set)
then surely our astronomers would have noticed a whacking great spaceship four
miles wide and moving at speed, even if Mondas itself is miraculously
camouflaged. The whole concept of ‘time distillation’ and very Moffaty but time
would speed up by seconds near a black hole, possibly minutes – not thousands
of years as it is here, not even in a spaceship four miles wide (and how the
heck does a spaceship that big even take off?) What the Telos is The Doctor
doing, having Missy ‘cosplay’ as The Doctor and trusting her with a ‘mission’
that she herself picked. Does he not remember the trouble he’s always getting
into without a dangerous untrustworthy foe getting involved? While it’s weird
going ahead with the plan at all its even weirder him staying behind in the
Tardis when she walks out with Bill and Nardole? (Though I do love Missy’s
banter, not sure whether to refer to Bill and Nardole as ‘pets’ or ‘snacks’
rather than ‘companions’). I get that she helped save them all at the end of ‘Empress Of Mars’
but just because I call a truce with the school bully doesn’t mean I
take my eye off him and give him my best friends. Especially in a situation and
an environment that Missy chose. That goes double for when The Doctor leaves
Missy alone, to meet back up with the Master, even though Nardole by his own
admission is better at the computer stuff (I’d want Missy where I could see her
at all times). The Doctor also acts very oddly when someone is waving a gun in
everyone’s faces – normally he’d be covering up saying no Humans were there or
that it was him that was from Earth, not leaving it to Bill. Making the
technician jumpy rather than trying to get the gun off him or ask what’s coming
up in the lift or even running away also seems very odd behaviour. The Doctor
works out that time is running at different speeds more or less straight away,
but rather than explaining while running down a corridor The Doctor explains it
to his companions at length, taking a week to raise an eyebrow, first. Moffat
writes in the black hole to do some weird things this episode too, neither of
which I’m entirely convinced is true. The obvious thing to do is to go back in
time and prevent Bill from getting shot – something that’s surely worth the
risk of crossing personal timelines for, only the black hole says no when in
proximity to Tardises apparently (something that didn’t seem to matter in other
Wh stories with black holes). Ditto the black hole somehow wipes the memory of
Missy, who can’t remember ever being on this ship (even though the Simm Master
has been here, in disguise, for years) yet can conveniently remember to pack a
spare dematerialisation circuit and carry it around with her. The Doctor could
have spent his time mid-regeneration going back in time and giving Bill a note
that she should stay home that day without any lectures or going back to save
Nardole and take everyone away in the Tardis, but doesn’t even think of doing
either. Some friend you are, Doc!
There’s absolutely no
reason for The Master to be in disguise, even if his dematerialisation circuit
burned out: he’s wanted on Earth, not Mondas and besides we’re clearly a long
way before Harold Saxon’s era given where the Cybermen are up to in their
timeline. There’s no reason he should keep Bill alive for all that time and no
reason The Cybermen should let him, delaying the operation for that long.
There’s no reason either for Bill to leave The Doctor’s side for his final
showdown when they’d be better off fighting side by side. Surely too a better
plan would be to either blow up the lift (so the Cybermen can’t get through)
and make use of the fact that Bill is a Cybermen and have her contradict their
orders. Missy really is uncharacteristically daft to turn her back on The
Master right after killing him (she knows his mind because it’s hers, even if
she can’t remember it. Alas we never find out what happens to Missy: it’s never
mentioned when she regenerates into Sacha Derwan for ‘Spyfall’).There’s no way that even
the Cybermen can upgrade their way through all their different variations
across the spaceship without the right metals on board and we already know
they’ve run out of people to transform until they reach Bill’s floor. So who
are they taking over? Bill’s Cyberman cries a tear, useful for picking up alien
hitchhikers, but how? Her tear ducts have presumably been removed. ‘Because
she’s really emotional’ doesn’t cut it: chances are the Mondasians knowing
they’re going to their deaths are pretty emotional too. And no it’s not
Heather’s tears, for the girlfriend only shows up when she senses Bill is
crying (So why doesn’t she turn up earlier in this story? Or even earlier in
the series? No way did Bill survive deeply emotional stories like ‘Knock Knock’ ‘Oxygen’
and ‘Lie Of the Land’ especially without shedding a
tear in the safety of her own room). I don’t buy for a second that Bill’s
subconscious refuses to let her see her as she really is (even if ‘phantom
limb’ syndrome is a real thing for some survivors here it’s different – Bill
now weighs about ten times more than she used to and would walk differently for
a start. The draft script explains this away by being a hangover from the
parallel world monks in ‘Extremis’
but even Moffat couldn’t quite get that to tie into this script). Even
something as small as the fact that the Mondasians we see tend to be towards
the short side, when we know Mondasians are generally a foot taller than Humans
(when we see them as Cybermen) doesn’t quite fit.
There are parts of this
story to that are awkwardly paced where people do things because the script
needs them to, not because it’s a natural thing for the to do, moved like chess
pieces across a board: the moment The Doctor re-programmes the computer so the
Cybermen search for timelords with two hearts not Mondasians with one is simply
to get The masters in a room with him so he can shout when they walk away; it
does absolutely nothing in plot terms and is indeed a stupid idea given The
Doctor isn’t that far away from the Mondasians and that he’s still their best
chance of survival. Neat as it is having two Masters here and clever and
fitting as their mutual destruction is they actually have surprisingly little
to do with the plot: a ‘real’ janitor could have handed Bill over just as
nicely. The tragedy is that Missy wants to stand with The Doctor but that he’ll
never know how much she changed. Which is poetic (and would have been
interesting had Chibnall carried it on rather than making The Master ‘bad’
again) and that works inside the story, but it’s a poor reward for a series arc
that’s teased us the whole season through about ‘who is lurking in the vault?’
and ‘Has Missy really changed?’ The irony is that both The Doctor and Missy
were ‘good men’ when it counted, but that it counted for nothing in the end,
which didin’t feel as if that’s where this season was heading. Bill is put into
a barn for safe keeping more because that’s where all Moffat characters go when
they’re scared and lonely than anything to do with the story (and how come a
scientifically advanced community like this still grow their own crops and have
windmills aboard a spaceship? How do these crops even grow?) We do however gets
lots of info that we didn’t know and which seems openly contradictory of past
Doctor-Master stories. The fact they started off ‘best friends’ I’ll sort of buy,
but The Doctor having a ‘man crush’ (‘At least I think we were both male at
that point)? No, just no! Go back and watch their first meeting in ‘Terror Of The Autons’. The Master is the
school bully, The Doctor his victim, only he’s grown since then. The only crush
Dr 3 is thinking of when they meet is the heavy object he’s going to sit on The
Masters head the moment he gets the chance.
They also waste two
really good sources of extra drama: Bill is the only Cyber-convert we meet and
everything is seen through her eyes. But what about the others? What about the poor chap in pain? Do they
understand what’s going on? It’s as if Moffat spent the first episode treating
The Cybermen with roe care than anyone since their creator Kit Pedler,
remembering that they’re really people not just giant robots, then forgot when
writing part two. Fr that’s the story I really want to see here, the sheer
desperation and extreme suffering that turned the Mondasians to go the other
way and stop caring. I’m sometimes asked which character is most like me in DW,
my soul twin in the Whoniverse; some days I feel like the Garm (riding the
timewinds and trying to escape being enslaved by capitalism), some days I feel
like K9 (the robot dog nobody listens to), some days I’m Alpha Centauri (a
diplomat in a world of fighters with extra limbs), some days I feel like a Rill
(minding my own business in an ammonia-filled jar and wondering why people want
to blow me up. Most days though I feel like the recently converted Cybermen
whose saying the word ‘pain’ over and over in a robotic voice who clearly has
m.e. like me. I wanted to know more about his story. I don’t actually think
life would be so bad: I mean, I’d knock into things even more than I do now,
but no pain, on falling over, n fod allergies, being able to open every jar?
Yes please, sign me up. Losing emotions seems a small price to pay for that.
The things is though I want to know if this character feels the same. How did
he get here? Where are his loved ones? What do they think about the impending
conversion? Why is nobody doing anything for him? Is he desperate enough to
sign up to cybernetic limbs by choice? It feels too as if Moffat is going to be
brave enough to comment on the state of the NHS (in terminal decline since
David Cameron brought in austerity measures so he could buy a shed to write his
memoirs in and give his mates a bonus). There are so many people that Bill is
effectively on a waiting list for a decade despite having a whacking great hole
in her tummy, people turn down a Cyberman’s voicebox rather than listen to him
describe being in pain, everyone is shuffling through darkened corridors,
abandoned and alone waiting for death. But Moffat, perhaps aware that he’s
being unfair to workers overstressed and understaffed and aware that they’re
caring for his poorly mum, lets it go and moves on to something else. It’s a
wasted opportunity too to go back to the real root of why Kit Pedler came up
with the Cybermen idea in 1966; his worry that prescription drugs used for
numbing people to pain were numbing them to feelings too. His view was that it
was better to be alive (and scared out of your wits) than walking around like a
zombie, all interests gone. It’s a thought all future Cyber stories ignore even
though there are clearly more prescriptions around in 2017 than in 1966 and
it’s an ever more topical story and returning to a hospital would be the
perfect setting. Had they had just one scene, of a Cybermen going from someone
lively and ‘Human’ for lack of a better word but in pain, to one that lost
their identity degree by degree, it would make the horror in the story so much
stronger. Especially if Bill vows to keep her feelings no matter what.
Equally you spend so much time with –Razor-Master and Missy bitching and
Bill’s struggles that you miss the real story, which is how ordinary Mondasians
find resistance against their own people is futile but continue to fight on
anyway. There’s only one adult who is barely sketched in (Hazran is there to
flirt with Nardole and nothing more) and we never get to know the Mondasian children, who would have been a great
source of drama too: how do they feel about impending doom? What does it mean
to be a child when the adults around you are all scared and there’s a threat
only a lift floor away trying to kill you? The only one we do know, Alit, we
don’t like: she randomly decides to give Bill a mirror fir no apparent reason
and then The Doctor has the audacity to say she’s being ‘kind’ (rather than cheeky!) Pull on any
thread in this story and it falls apart. The time aspect doesn’t fit with the
Cybermen bit nor the part with the two Masters and we end up with a story
that’s often quite jarring and disjointed. One bit that doesn’t feature in the
story but makes you wonder: what happens back home, at St Luke’s University?
Their prize lecturer and their canteen girl, often seen together, randomly
disappear the same night mere months after a number of other students go
missing (‘Knock Knock’). No wonder Bill
never goes home: she’d probably be arrested! Every other time a companion
‘dies’ (or gets sent back in time and/or to a parallel universe) the family are
around to hear what happened but not here. Is Bill’s adopted mum still
searching for her daughter in vain? What trauma does it cause to the few
flatmates who did survive ‘Knock Knock’? Moffat doesn’t stop to think. Even the
episode titles don’t quite fit: ‘World Enough’ is a poetic and all but has
nothing whatsoever to do with the plot (it’s taken from a very Moffatty line in
the Andrew Marvell poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’, ‘had we but world enough and
time this coyness lady were no crime’, a poem about how a lover could stare at
his lover’s eyes for ten years and never get bored – the same with her breasts,
but for 2000 years!) ‘The Doctor Falls’ is worse. He doesn’t physically fall in
this story, well only against a panel - Bill does though when the Cyberman suit
falls off her in a glorious shot.
He likes bleak series
finales does Steven Moffat. We’ve had Roman Rorys waiting 2000 years then
shooting the girl he loves, the 11th Doctor apparently dying in a Viking
funeral pyre, Amy and Rory stuck in their own past after being attacked by a
colossal statue of liberty (don’t ask), the conversion of Clara’s boyfriend
into a Cybermen and the Doctor and Clara wiping each other’s memory. This one
though is by far and away the bleakest. ‘We’re not going to get out of this one
are we?’ asks Bil near the end and for once The DEoctor doesn’t put on a brave
face, or make her feel better, or say a plan will come along, he just stares
blankly. So does Nardole. There’s no comfort in this story, just brutal
realism. This isn’t like the ‘old’ days when Rory used to die and then be
resurrected three times a series, this is actual death. I hoped Bill would be
protected from all that: after all, her whole story arc was about learning to
trust the universe again after a difficult upbringing, to believe in miracles
that everything would be alright and the Doctor could save her just as she
could save him. She’s wrong, in all the worst ways, accidentally abandoned then
converted then killed and only then is she saved. So much of this story works
in the way ‘normal’ Moffat Dr Who goes, but this time there’s no maguffin in
the last quarter, no easy fix by going back in time, no cavalry coming to the
rescue: bad things happen and they keep happening, even to good people. It’s a
tough story this one, part of the gradual slide from where Moffat started with
the ‘fairytale’ world of season five to brutal realism where you don’t think
they’re going to be brave enough to go there, to actually shoot a hole in
Bill’s middle, to have Bill stranded for a decade, to have The Master and Missy
destroying each other as part of their petty squabble, to have that one last
desperate doomed attempt to fight back and then they do. Though the mechanics
of getting these characters in the right places causes lots of awkwardness in
the conjoining scenes the ‘meaty’ ones are all brilliantly well done and ‘feel’
right.
It’s only proper that the
Masters would spend the episodes flirting and in love with themselves (a
gorgeous contrast with the always bickering Doctors!) but be secretly plotting
each other’s downfall before stabbing each other in the back Having two Masters
to play with leads to some of Moffat’s best lines, from The Doctor’s comment on
their flirting would you like to be alone?’ to Missy comment that she’s in ‘two
minds, Fortunately one of them is unconscious right now!’ Though the best line is Razor’s comment ‘When you hug me it
hurts my heart…Your chest unit digs right in!’ Bill’s scene of panic and terror at what she’s become, accidentally
losing her temper and firing at her best friend, is wonderfully done. The
three-way debate between The Doctor, Bill and Nardole about who should
sacrifice their life and blow up the floor they’re on is gorgeous writing,
Moffat as his best as three selfless people pretend to be nasty and egotistical
to get their way, all out of love. The moment Nardole realises he’s beaten and
wanders off, promising to kick Bill’s arse if she disagrees (to which she
replies she lost it some time ago) is hauntingly done. Had there been just one
of these sequences it would have been too much – all four in two episodes and
I’m an emotional wreck (t could have been worse: a lot of Nardole’s lines were
trimmed before filming, one of which was him pouring out his life story at
least. Only he can’t remember most of it as he wiped his own memory at twenty
and his earliest memory is crying over having to wipe his memory). All three
leads are sizzling in this scene but none more than Matt Lucas who should have
been given more lines like this. The Doctor’s last glorious stand is no slouch
either, as he pontificates and shoots at length, avenging each and every planet
we ever saw fall to The Cybermen (even Marinus! Does that mean, as some fans
think and which the rather odd 6th Doctor comic strip ‘The World
Shapers’ claims, that the Voord are really an early stage of Cybermen? See ‘Keys Of Marinus’ for more). Razor’s reveal is a great
classic Dr Who twist, the worst possible thing that could happen to Bill at
that moment and we at home know that things have gone very very wrong. This is
as bleak a story as Dr Who ever delivered, beautifully made, exquisitely
crafted, the story that Moffat really really really thought was going to be his
last and his biggest epic in space and time, one where nobody wins and
everybody loses. I can totally see why a sizeable number of fans think it’s the
best Dr Who story ever. For three or four individual scenes it might well be.
It’s the connecting scenes in between that let it down. So in the final
verdict: a powerful, devastating, rollercoaster of a story with a lot to say that
packs more of an emotional punch that probably any other Moffat era story with
a whole lot of things going for it and a heartbreaking but brilliant ending for
Bill that leaves me more of a puddle than Heather and a fitting one for the
Masters. However is it the best story of the Moffat era, the way a few fans
think? Not quite – there are too many mistakes here and there for that. Still,
the 12th Dr really grows across his last season and its a strong, worthy ending
for series ten, one of the more consistently excellent series of modern Who.
POSITIVES + I’ve always
loved the early Cybermen and after re-building them for use in the excellent
‘Adventure In Space and Time’ docu-drama about the early years of Dr Who in
2013 (easily Mark Gatiss’ best work) I’m surprised it took Capaldi suggesting
it to recycle the costumes here. They’re great, very much in keeping with what
we saw in 1966, right on the cusp between humanity and cybernetics and all the
creepier for it compared to the jug-eared loons of later years. They’re
relentless, inhumane and powerful as always yet these ones look fragile, a
reminder of just how desperate this race is to survive at all costs. Even the
sing-songy robotic voices, the ‘weak link’ in ‘The Tenth Planet’, works well here,
with Bill’s familiar voice now distorted through them. Mercifully Bill is only
seen converted bit by bit so never suffers the ignominy of the only other
female we’ve seen in Who, in the ‘Cyberwoman’ episode of ‘Torchwood’ (where Ianto’s
girlfriend walks around in a cyber bikini. For no other reason than because
it’s Torchwood!) Incidentally, with voices like that, plastic heads and vacant
expressions The Spice Girls would surely have been a big hit on Mondas.
Also, The Doctor explains
away the fact that he’s encountered the origins of the Cybermen before in
spin-offs with the single line ‘parallel evolution’. Here they are…
I have several favourite Big Finish
stories I can never choose between: 5th Doctor alternate Beale-less
timeline ‘Fanfare For The Common Men’ (see ‘The Devil’s Chord’), the 6th Doctor’s regeneration story ‘The Last
Adventure’ (see ‘Time and The
Rani’), the best of the ‘Companion
Chronicles’ ‘The Sleeping City’ (a Moffat style time adventure that somehow
also feels like the perfect Hartnell adventure lovingly read out by William
Russell), ‘The Shadow Of the Scourge’ (an oh so 7th Doctor story
featuring massive stakes played out against the tiny backdrop of a hotel in
Kent), ‘The Switching’ (in which The Master and The Doctor change places for
the day and cause havoc at UNIT!), ‘Dr Who and The Pirates’ (Colin Baker does
Gilbert and Sullivan and does so rather well!) and ‘Bang! Bang! A Boom! (The
Eurovision Song Contest…in space! See ‘The Interstellar Song
Contest’). However if all of time and space
was at stake and I had to choose just one story out of the entire range (and I
admit even I haven’t quite heard all of it…) then it would be ‘Spare Parts’
(2002), a Cybermen ‘origin’ story released as volume #34 in Big Finish’s main
range. Marc ‘Ghost Light’ Platt has made a second career for himself filling in
continuity holes in Dr Who stories but never did so better than with this one,
which finds some sympathy with the Cybermen and asks how awful their lives on
Mondas must have been for them to resort to replacing their body parts. Steven
Moffat himself said in interviews that he was inspired by how good this story
was, with its giant barren hospitals full of a people in pain and their
increasing desperation as their world spins out of control away from the sun:
basically all the best bits from ‘World Enough and Time’ are here already (but
no Masters shooting themselves, no Nardole and with Nyssa in place of Bill – oh
and we’re on Mondas the planet, not a spaceship). ‘Spare Parts’ is even darker
than the TV story in many respects, with Mondas riddled by such bitter cold
that the population have been forced underground living like animals, so
desperate that they’ve taken to trading body parts on the black market. A lot
of people die in this story, most of them painfully, while even the cybermats –
a cute novelty in so many cyber-stories – are utterly terrifying here. For once
The Doctor doesn’t want to help – he knows how things turn out at a fixed point
in time and feels there’s nothing he can do; it’s Nyssa whose the moral compass
here, risking her life to help people in need and driven by her own inner
demons after the destruction of Traken in ‘Logopolis’ and her desperation that these people should survive. Peter
Davison and Sarah Sutton both act their socks off in this story which demands a
lot from both of them and it’s deeply unusual to hear them at odds with each
other and both claiming the moral high ground, but it’s Nicholas Briggs’
suffering half-converted Cybermen who will haunt your dreams. Best of all
though is that the script which really looks at the psychology of what it would
really be like to feel your humanity ripped away bit by bit while conscious; of
all the writers to handle the Cybermen Platt is the one who best understands
why Davis and Pedler first created them and that they’re more than a mere robot
army. A really special story that’s tougher than ‘Earthshock’, more brutal than ‘Androzani’ and more imaginative than ‘The
Web Planet’ combined that comes
highly recommended. Be warned though, it’s not for the faint-hearted (and if
you are there’s a seller on Mondas who’ll do you a good offer…)
‘The Best Of Days’ (2020) was the name
given to Steven Moffat’s accompanying video for the ‘World Enough’ lockdown
tweetalong, which as well as returning to the past gave comment on the ‘Black
Lives Matter’ protests that followed the murder of George Floyd by American
police that Summer. As a result it’s arguably the most substantial of all of
the tweetalong videos (and a surprise omission from the ‘Lockdown’ book). Pearl
Mackie and Matt Lucas return as Bill and Nardole three years after their last
appearance in the show in a story set some time after this story. Nardole has
set a ‘positive news only policy’ in place and is happily chatting to Bill
about his life as guardian of the Mondasian children, celebrating the fact that
the cyber invasion and certain doom has been pushed back from Tuesday to
Wednesday (‘so the barbeque is back on!’) and the fact that he very nearly
didn’t break a leg (which took his mind off the fact that he really has broken
the other leg and is being pushed around in a wheelbarrow). Bill, meanwhile, is
flying round the universe with Heather and having problems with her love life
(‘I mean every relationship starts with you thinking the other person is a
Goddess, but it’s when they remain a Goddess it becomes really annoying..She
thinks she knows everything. Just because she’s omniscient!’) Like many people in
lockdown Bill’s stuck in her flat and has a revelation: that she loves
everyone, even the people she thought she hated, because she misses being with them.
Bill’s just back from the most people she’s seen in ages, but the reasons she
was out there wasn’t good (‘’Let’s just say that not all Cybermen wear handles
on their heads’). Bill also reflects that humanity keeps making the same
mistakes over and over again but reflects ‘Hey?...Maybe this time is it’. And
even though Bill’s been asked to keep it positive you can hear the despondency
shine through every word (almost as if Moffat himself was asked to keep his
video positive and didn’t really feel it). The pair of old friends then discuss
what they might do if The Doctor re-appears in their life – and wouldn’t you
know it? The sound of the Tardis arrives in the background. It’s one of
Moffat’s finest bits of writing, not least because at the time it was very much
honest to goodness meant to be his last work for Dr Who ever (see ‘Boom!’
for how his retirement turned out); at the time of writing it is still the last
appearance for Bill and Nardole and the two actors are brilliant at stepping
back in character. All in all one of the very best lockdown videos. The only
downside is that we don’t see either of them, just hear them against the same
swirling graphic of the spaceship – oh and the fact that these videos are still
not available anywhere except the official Dr Who Youtube lockdown channel.
Previous ‘The Eaters Of Light’ next ‘Twice Upon A Time’
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