The Doctor Falls

I'm not a doctor. I'm the Doctor. The original you might say.

In the wake of the goodness that was World Enough and Time I'm curious to see how we go to The Doctor Falls. It is unfortunately somewhat rare for the second half of a two-parter to be as good or better than the first part. Sometimes the fall off is minimal (like the Library two-parter), but other times the story just crashes and burns (such as the end of Series 3). In all likelihood, this will actually be the second in a three-part story as I find it hard to imagine that Steven Moffat will end this story with the Doctor beginning to regenerate as shown at the beginning of last episode. So we will probably have another cliffhanger to enjoy while we wait six months for the Christmas special.

Plot Summary

Following the reveal of Bill's conversion, the Doctor is attacked and knocked against a control panel by the two Masters. Woozy, the Masters place him in a wheelchair and take him to the roof where they contemplate how to kill him. The Doctor arouses though and laughs, informing them that when he was knocked against the control panel, he expanded the scope of the Cybermen's criteria for upgrade to include two hearts. The group is subsequently attacked by a Cyberman and the Doctor is hit. Bill kills the attacking Cyberman and the whole group is rescued by Nardole who had run off and found a transport shuttle.

Nardole is able to cut through several hundred floors but they are forced to stop still five hundred floors below the bridge in a region where crops are grown. The farmers had seen invasions from the proto-Cybermen, killed them and posted them as scarecrows. They take in the refugees but keep Bill locked in the barn, though the Doctor assures everyone that she will not harm them. Nardole and the Doctor establish defenses around the farmhouse, anticipating the arrival of the Cybermen in pursuit of them.

Bill wakes, unaware that she has been converted to a Cyberman due to the mind conditioning she established during the Monk invasion. She is visited by a young girl, the only one who isn't afraid of her, who shows her a mirror. Bill sees her converted self but refuses to believe it until the Doctor arrives and helps her see. In her anger and confusion, she fires her head laser and blows a hole in the barn.

The Cybermen arrive in a scout force and are beaten back by the farmer's weapons and some upgrades from Nardole, utilizing the various lines of the spaceship around them. The Cybermen retreat and remobilize, preparing to come in force to destroy rather than simply convert.

The Master itches around for a way to escape but can't head back to his TARDIS as he burned out the dematerialization circuit evading the black hole. Missy, wavering between helping her former self and helping the Doctor, produces one, having held on to a vague memory of herself telling her former self about it. The two Masters prepare to leave, though the Doctor appeals for them to stay. They walk away, though Missy waffles for a bit.

The Doctor and Bill open a passage through the ducts of the ship that will take the residents of the level up to a subsequent farming floor. The Doctor then sends all the children and most of the other residents under the care of Nardole. Nardole protests at first but the Doctor absorbs his defense program into the sonic screwdriver and then sends him off. They retreat up the passageway just as the first line of Cybermen break through to the floor.

In the distraction of the battle, the Masters arrive at the lifts that will carry them back to the Master's TARDIS. Missy finally appeals to the Master to go back and help the Doctor. He refuses and she then stabs him in the back with a knife. He falls back to the lift and hits her with the full blast of his laser screwdriver. He then heads down the lift, holding off his regeneration until he can reach his TARDIS. Missy lies back on the grass and smiles as the sound of battle rages.

The Doctor, already showing signs of regeneration following his first attack on the roof, charges into battle destroying multiple Cybermen. He is surrounded and shot by a lead Cyberman, triggering a full burst of regeneration energy. The Doctor suppresses it and detonates a charge, destroying nearly the whole level, killing all the Cybermen and effectively killing himself.

Bill, the lone survivor of the battle due to her being shielded from the explosion, finds the Doctor and cries out in despair, beginning to cry. As she does, Heather reappears and modifies Bill's molecular structure out of the Cybersuit into a form similar to hers. This time, Bill accepts her offer to travel together and they take the Doctor back to his TARDIS and set it in motion before flying out the door.

A tear from Bill's eye splashes on the Doctor before she leaves and the tear sparks regeneration energy, reviving the Doctor. He lands in a snowy landscape and begins to fully regenerate but suppresses it, insisting he will not change. He hears a similar refrain and out of the snow he sees the First Doctor approaching him.

Analysis

I think it's safe to say that my ability to do predictions are somewhere between Jack and $h!t as the episode ended with the Doctor holding off his regeneration and then meeting the First Doctor in the snow. But as for the rest of the story, I'm a little meh on it. There were parts that were quite good and I was very jazzed by the appearance of the First Doctor at the end, but overall, the story seemed muddled and Moffat once again could not get away from his mantra of "Everybody lives."

One of the biggest things to differentiate here is the characters and their performances from the overall storyline. I had no fault with any of the characters. The Doctor was excellent and gave a great speech to define himself and what he does. It only added to the John Simm Master's character that he ignored it completely. In fact the John Simm Master was in top form as the heartless bastard that he is. Bill was good in her crisis and I really appreciated being able to see her outside of the Cyberman suit so we could get a proper bead on her emotions, which might have been lost otherwise.

But if the performances were good, the story was heavily muddled. It was never made clear just why the Doctor was already beginning to regenerate. I'm assuming it was from the Cyberman attack shown in the flashback, but that's not clear and that just started the muddling process. How did patients from the hospital escape and get up to the five hundredth floor? Were these similar expeditions to that which took Bill at the beginning of World Enough and Time? Was this the first floor with humans living on it or were anyone living below just abandoned to the Cybermen and they made their stand here because they couldn't go any further?

There were also too many parts that were never really used. We are introduced to the farmers but they don't have time to be anything other than the objects to be protected. Once the Master is revealed and they flee the floor of the Cybermen, he does nothing. He cracks bad jokes and is a dick to others but he is just a loose thread that never gets used. He sits until Missy magically provides a way for him to escape and then she sets his regeneration in motion. He in turn, ensures that she will not continue as the Master in the next Doctor's tenure.

In fact, I'm curious as to how the Master will continue. Missy is hit with the full blast and the Master even notes that she needn't bother trying to regenerate. Does this mean that she can't regenerate and is the final iteration of the Master? Or was he wrong and she does regenerate into a new Master, find his way to the bridge and steer the colony ship away to a point where he can find his TARDIS, which presumably was taken prior to Missy's attempted execution. I don't mind some loose threads, but I would have liked at least an indication that Missy could have regenerated rather than see her just lie back and seem to die.

It's also a bit disappointing that we never really got much detail on Missy's supposed turn to good. Frankly, it seemed to weaken her character. I thought she was at her height in The Witch's Familiar when she is prepared to kill Clara as easily as be friendly with her. Her subsequent change in demeanor to one that is more scared and giving it to rational emotion seems different and caused the character to lose an edge? Her bite took a serious hit and only came back in brief flashes, though it seemed close to back in World Enough and Time. But in this story, it seemed completely gone except for the moment where she is fully dark with her old self. Once the self-preservation instinct kicks in, she loses that edge again and it doesn't come back except for that flash when she slips the knife into the Master's back.

I did like the battle scenes and the reminder that since they were on a ship, they really could blow things up around them, as opposed to if they were on an actual planet. I was highly amused at the shear volume of references to previous stories, some of which were too obscure even for me. I did also like that the Doctor was eventually overrun and effectively killed by the Cybermen, showing they were not the useless villains that they have always seemed to come across as in the past. It gave them a little bite, despite the fact that the Doctor and his group was blowing them up willy-nilly prior to that.

I also was amused by the very blatent references to two of the most well known regenerations: Logopolis and The Caves of Androzani. Logopolis was pretty easy to see as you had images of prior companions saying Doctor as the Doctor faces his death, but The Caves of Androzani was a bit more subtle. In fact, I would have completely missed it but Chris Burgess of RFS pointed out that while the Fifth Doctor had five companions say his name before the Master appeared, there were twelve companions who stated his name this time prior to the appearance of Missy. This is a deep reference that you can only give props to a superfan like Steven Moffat to put out.

So let's get to the part that seems to be chafing the worst, the Deus Ex of Deus Ex Machinas: Heather's arrival and her and Bill's magical fixing of everything. Deus Ex Machinas happen in Doctor Who, you just accept it, though I tend to ding stories that rely on it. I think I could have accepted this one a bit better if A) we had had some hint of Heather's return in subsequent stories, such as a star eye glimmer or a vision of her face appearing in the background in times of turmoil (such as during the Monk's reign) and B) if this wasn't the exact same trope we had last series. Some people dislike this one more than Clara's; I happen to dislike Clara's more but that's more because I thought Clara's arc was better suited to her staying dead. Bill, unlike Clara, showed caution and appreciation of the danger she was stepping into. It took a lot of convincing by the Doctor to go onto the colony ship and I think a love redemption after dealing with ten years of crap on this trip is acceptable. I just wish it didn't feel like it came completely out of left field as though Moffat wrote himself into a corner and couldn't figure out how to get out of it.

The Rapunzel magic tear was also a bit of a bridge too far for me. The Doctor forestalls regeneration and instead blows himself up. I could buy that some of the regeneration energy was in there and needed a catalyst to get started but what about the tear is that catalyst? It's deviation into fantasy and while I don't mind that (see The Androids of Tara), there was nothing about this story that set itself up as in-line for a fantasy storyline. Indeed, the prior episode was well grounded in science and gave a strong vibe of realism, which made it feel so good. This again feels like a writer desperately searching for a way out of a corner that has wet paint all around him.

For all the flaws in the story, I cannot fault the direction of the episode. It was well shot and boosted a lot even in ordinary scenes. The scenes of Bill coming to grips with what she had become were especially well done and Rachel Talalay deserves mad props for those. The steady darkening of the atmosphere after each Cybermen attack adds to the dread that comes from each wave of Cyberman attacks and is effective in keeping the mood of the story in that vein of struggle in the face of hopelessness.

One other thing that bugs me and I hope there is expansion on this in the Christmas special is why the Doctor is so resistant to his regeneration. The Tenth Doctor couched regeneration in the frame of the death of that particular personality, which is not an unfair comparison. But we saw him resist and explain that. We even had evidence of it when he bypassed regeneration in favor of making "Handy Doctor". That was even elaborated on by the Eleventh Doctor in noting that he had vanity issues in those days. So why does the Twelfth Doctor, with a full set of regenerations in front of him (and who has been more cavalier about expending regeneration energy than any other Doctor) so resistant to change? I don't see the motivation for that. Forestalling regeneration to defeat the Cybermen? Yes, I can understand that. But I see no reason why he would deny the process after they are defeated.

But I feel I should end on the potentially most redeeming factor, the appearance of the First Doctor. This had been rumored for a couple of weeks and bandied about as a possibility ever since An Adventure in Space and Time aired. Now we have it and I'm very excited. Initial guesses are that this is going to take place in that brief moment when the Doctor heads towards the TARDIS after he and Polly are freed from the Cyberman ship by Ben at the end of Episode Four of The Tenth Planet, but that's just speculation. Still, it made for a very exciting note to end on after having gone through a real roller coaster of emotions regarding the prior sixty minutes.

So how does one judge this overall? The story was all over the place and the pacing equally iffy. But the performances, the atmosphere and tease at the end are all very good. In the end, I'm going to give a bit of leeway since it ultimately was an enjoyable run, even if I was approaching Spock levels of eyebrow arch at various points. It was the anticipated fall off from the set up, but I think it's more Utopia to The Sound of Drums fall off rather than The Sound of Drums to Last of the Time Lords fall off. Good enough to enjoy at any random turn.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5