World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls: Ranking - 165

     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?!?'  

 

 He likes bleak series finales does Steven Moffat. We’ve had Roman Rorys waiting 2000 years then shooting the girl he loves, the 11^th 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. Somehow, though, 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 (at least Katarina and Adric ‘caused’ their deaths, while Peri’s was created by the timelords taking the Doctor away at just the wrong moment). Even the coda, which does the usual Steven Moffat thing of putting everything right again despite all the odds, takes place away from the Doctor so he for one treats it as a loss. Similarly Missy, the incarnation of The Master whose closest of all of them to being ‘good’, has been going through a series arc of her own thanks to the Doctor and seems to be about to choose the light side, until Moffat takes the rug out from under our feet and has her violently regenerate instead, all that redemption for nothing. This is as bleak a story as DW 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 (he ends up making two more Christmas specials), one where nobody wins and everybody loses. A lot of series finales have the Doctor losing as much as he gained but here there are just losers and bigger losers, the Cybermen converting damaged Mondasians the biggest sufferers of all. I’m sometimes asked which character is most like me in DW, my soul twin in the Whoniverse; well sorry to say it’s the recently converted Cybermen whose saying the word ‘pain’ over and over in a robotic voice who clearly has m.e. Such a downbeat ending is entirely in keeping with ‘The Tenth Planet’ though, the first DW regeneration story and one where the Doctor loses as much as he gains. Given that Moffat wasn’t meant to be in charge at all and had run out of ideas he idly asked fellow fan Peter Capaldi what he would most want to do if he could do anything in DW and the answer was a masterstroke: bring back the Cybermen, not as the clunking robots of the Tennant and Smith years but in their first incarnation in ‘The Tenth Planet’, when you could still see the human parts left over, the bits of cloth and the eyeballs of the actor. A ‘Genesis of the Cybermen’ to go alongside ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, back when they were real people on a sister planet to the Earth that was dying out, was an obvious story to write at some stage and long overdue, though nobody ever quite pictured it like this, a Mondas refugee spaceship so vast that time travels differently at opposite ends. I’m still haunted by the scenes where Bill, after a series of gradually finding her place in the universe and being its unsung heroine, is shunned again – not for being a working class Black lesbian this time but because she’s a Cybermen herself and everyone is afraid of her even though she feels no different (for no good reason as it turns out, again). Very clever camerawork switches from Bill as she sees herself (normal) and how other people see her (a threat); it’s a clever subtle metaphor for both race and the LGBQT community that says a lot more than being direct ever could, certainly compared to the Chibnall lectures waiting in the wings. Good job Bill ends up resurrected as an immortal space puddle in a nod to the season opener or I’d never forgive this episode, although I still don’t quite buy how tidy that is that they found each other at that particular point in time. I still find it sad too that, after all those episodes of trying to be good, Missy ended up dying instead – even if it’s hilarious that (spoilers) it ends up being The Master who kills her, after two episodes of flirting with her (of course they would love each other enough to do that, in contrast to the various Doctor’s constant bickering, but which incarnation came first and which one does she turn into? Frustratingly we never see!) The saddest scene of all though might just be Nardole, the comedy relief who was never really given enough to do to make an impact, suddenly turning brave and evacuating children, looking back at his friends knowing full well that he’ll probably never see them again (we’ve certainly never seen him again – so far). 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. Any episode this moving has to be good but like a lot of the Capaldi era there are a lot of things working against this story too. The whole concept of a black hole causing time to run at a different speed at one end of a spaceship compared to the other is just gobbledegook; it might make it run at a different speed to other objects but even a spaceship 400 miles wide wouldn’t have that big of a gravitational pull that it would be affected differently. It’s also a straight copy of ‘The Girl Who Waited’ (and I was a blubbing mess after that one too) where the companion has to wait for help that never comes because the hero is trapped in a much slower world. We see frustratingly little of the early Cybermen or Mondas and learn very little we didn’t already know from earlier stories – how much more affecting would this story have been if we’d got to know a converted Cyberman that wasn’t Bill? Peter Capaldi is also hard done by too: everyone else is getting a lot to do but he spends his near-last hurrah pontificating, delaying the action and then walking onto a battlefield; he doesn’t get any of the big emotional centrepieces David Tennant or Matt Smith did when they lost their companions and his last two stories are shared with River Song and the 1^st Doctor, so he’s never the focal point again. 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, even if they play oddly little part in the action after a season of thinking the finale was going to revolve purely around them. 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 12^th 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.

+ 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 year of DW 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. And with their sing-songy robotic voices, plastic heads and vacant expressions The Spice Girls would surely have been a big hit on Mondas.

- John Simms’ Master is great in the Tennant stories, where the Doctor is the eye in the calm of a storm you know is about to hit compared to The Master’s storm with sudden moments of calm inside, but here Capaldi’s giving him nothing to work with and Simm starts at manic and goes up from there. Simms also can’t disguise himself the way Anthony Ainley could (I saw through Razor straight away and I’m shocked no one else did – to be fair probably as shocked as they are that I didn’t see The Master as Sir Gilles Estram or Kalid first time round). Teasing us with an opening regeneration sequence that won’t be seen properly until the end of the following story broadcast five whole months later is also so not on!!!