Donna, I've been a father before.
The Doctor's Daughter closes the three part Martha interlude in Series Four. It is also one of the least regarded stories of the series. I don't remember it being terrible but with as provocative a title as that, it led a lot of fans to think one thing and what they ended up with was so far away that they grew resentful of the difference. That we're well removed, is it still worth all the disdain?
Plot Summary
The TARDIS is pulled through the time tunnel with the Doctor, Donna and Martha all clinging for any kind of support. They arrive in a tunnel scattered with debris and are immediately set upon by three human soldiers. The soldiers grab the Doctor and force his arm into a machine which extracts a tissue sample and uses it to create a new female soldier, genetically descended from the Doctor.
While trying to process this, the squad is attacked by a group of humanoid fish called the Hath. The two sides fire at each other while one sneaks around and grabs Martha. With two soldiers down, the squad leader detonates explosives in the tunnel, collapsing it and trapping Martha on the other side. He then takes the Doctor and Donna to see General Cobb.
On the other side of the tunnel, most of the squad was killed in the explosion. Martha tends to one with a dislocated shoulder. She pops it back into place as a second squad comes up. The Hath whom Martha tended to stops the others from killing her and together they take her back to their own headquarters. Because of her compassion in healing them, she is welcomed by the group.
At the human headquarters, General Cobb relates how the humans and Hath had come to the planet together, hoping to forge a new society. Things broke down and they have been fighting a war for generations, the origin of the war long since forgotten. The Doctor is shown a map of the complex and he is able to extract additional information, hoping to find Martha. Cobb however sees that the map is showing the lost temple where the Source is located. Believing that it will be the ultimate weapon to destroy the Hath, he decides to mount an expedition in the morning to recover it. He then orders the Doctor and Donna locked up because of their protests to the fighting. Not wanting to take chances, he also locks up the soldier extracted from the Doctor, now named Jenny, fearing her fighting spirit having been taken from pacifist stock.
Unbeknownst to any of them, at the same time, the Hath had been showing Martha the map, trying to explain where they were. They also saw the additions the Doctor extracted and form up to also head for the Source. Martha is left behind with the Hath she healed, who points out where they are going. He also rotates the map to 3-D and Martha realizes that it would be faster if they went outside. The Hath brings up the atmospheric conditions but Martha figures that she can survive the exposure for the journey and makes her way to the outer hatch.
In the prison, Donna talks the Doctor into accepting Jenny as his daughter, demonstrating that she has two hearts just as he does. The Doctor does accept her but relays his own genocidal past in trying to explain how killing the other side is simply wrong.
Jenny teases the guard and grabs his gun, allowing them to get out of the cell. They sneak into the outer tunnels and follow the Doctor's map, trying to reach the Source first. As they progress, Donna notes that each room they were in holds a serial number that is steadily going backwards.
They enter a new room just as Cobb discovers their escape and launches a raid after them. They are blocked by a series of lasers set up in a hallway. Jenny doubles back to cover them but the Doctor insists that fighting isn't the answer. Cobb calls out for Jenny to join them but she instead shoots a pipe creating a steam barrier. The Doctor temporarily shuts off the laser barrier allowing him and Donna to get through. Jenny, caught up in the euphoria of refusing to kill, hesitates allowing the lasers to cut off the path again. She however performs a series of acrobatics which allow her to get through the hallway, separating them from the Cobb's pursuit.
Martha and her Hath companion reach a hatch to the surface and open it. The Hath hesitates but follows Martha out the hatch to the surface. They make their way towards the spire of the central building. As they approach, Martha looses her footing and falls into a pit where a tar-like liquid has pooled. She is trapped and begins to sink. The Hath follows her down and tries to pull her out but can't reach her. He then jumps into the pool and pushes her out. This however causes him to sink and drown in the pool. Martha cries out for him but then crawls back to the top of the pit and continues towards the spire.
The Doctor, Donna and Jenny reach end of hallway just as they hear General Cobb break through the laser barrier. The Doctor finds a door and they enter the Temple, which is actually the control center of the ship that brought the settlers here. They find a log which details how the captain died and a power struggled formed between the human and Hath colonists. Donna also finds a clock and determines that the numbers etched into the various rooms are completion dates from when the robot excavators finished each section. From this they determine that although the war has lasted for generations, it has actually only been going on for a week of actual time.
They move further inward of the control room where they find Martha, having just entered from an exterior hatch. They also hear Cobb's men trying to break through and see the Hath cutting through another door. They also smell flowers and follow it to a center location where the Doctor discovers a terraforming globe, designed to rework the surface of the planet once the colony was established. Both armies converge on the site but the Doctor stops them, pointing out that their ancestors worked together before to create life and they can do it again. He then breaks the globe and the chemical compound moves out and begins to rework the planet.
Both sides lay down their arms but Cobb shoots at the Doctor. Jenny, seeing Cobb's movement, jumps in front of the bullet, killing her. Cobb's men disarm him and hold him down. The Doctor hopes for a minute that some of his regeneration energy passed through her but she remains dead. Angered, the Doctor picks up Cobb's gun and points it directly at his head, holding there for a few seconds before dropping the gun and pointing out that he never would and that should be the credo of their new civilization.
The humans and Hath join camps and lay Jenny out in a funeral ceremony. The Doctor, Donna and Martha then slip away in the TARDIS. They drop Martha off at her home before journeying on. However, back on the terraforming planet, a small burst of regeneration energy does trigger and Jenny leaps off the bier she was laying on. She takes a small ship and launches into space, determined to explore the galaxy.
Analysis
I don't think this story is as bad as it is often made out to be but it is a story of wasted potential. I happened to watch this one for the second time in two parts. By coincidence, it was just before the laser barrier scene and that is a bit of a key marker. Before that point, you could see the potential of the story: two races locked in a bitter war, people created just to be soldiers and perpetuate the war, the Doctor angry at the creation of an offspring that only reminds him of all that he lost. That all sounds really good. However, when the story picked back up, all the depth went out the window and the story became running, silliness and a slapped together, schmaltzy ending.
For the most part, I enjoyed the acting. The Doctor and Donna were the best both with the light teasing and the seriousness that developed when the Doctor opened up. Martha was pretty good, especially since she was interacting with a non-verbal group and had to carry most of that load herself. Most of the side characters, like Cobb, were also pretty good.
Jenny was a less good. When obeying orders and acting like a genuine soldier, she worked well. Her interaction with the Doctor was less so. I think she couldn't decide just how child-like she was supposed to be. Her enthusiasm for doing anything that pleased the Doctor seemed very much like a toddler that has just gotten praise from their parents. It made her sacrifice later seem unearned, though it did play in with the tumble through the lasers.
Let's just get it out of the way now, I hated the tumble through the lasers. It was ridiculously stupid especially as the Doctor had already cleared the path. Jenny could easily have come back after refusing to shoot just as the Doctor shut down the lasers. They beat a quick path through and just make it as the lasers come back. The worst offense of the scene though is the fact that it took what had been a somewhat thought provoking story and turned it into a cartoon. From that point on, everything they did seemed disingenuous as though they were trying to get back what they had lost. They didn't try that hard but that's a different point.
As noted above, it was after this point that the story took a different tone. Martha's little adventure was completely pointless. The story needed to have someone go to the Hath to show them where the temple was and set up the race. But Martha's overland journey and the death of her Hath companion did nothing. My impression was that they wanted to show the Hath as having similar values to the humans, including self sacrifice, but the Hath had already been established as that with their fair treatment and acceptance of Martha after healing one of their own. Martha could have been taken along with the patrol and reunited with the Doctor when the Hath showed up. It was going for an emotional punch but it just wasted time. If Martha had gone with the main group, she could have continued to show kindness and compassion with the Hath. As told, the main group could have easily assumed that Martha killed the Hath who was with her and then ran ahead to warn the Doctor to create a trap.
And that plays into the slapdash ending. I liked that the war had been going on for only a week but that the death of generations had destroyed that memory. It made for a nice twist. But I don't see how the Doctor pointing to a swirling green ball that's going to terraform the planet encourages both sides to lay down their arms. The Doctor could have dropped the ball releasing the gases and still had both sides start shooting at each other, determined to take control of the new world for themselves. Instead, they lay down because the show was nearly over.
Jenny's death was also hastily done. I think they were going for poignant sacrifice but her range of emotions had been all over the map so far that there wasn't much of a connection to her. It also felt like a very stagey death and I couldn't help but draw mental comparisons to Talia's death in The Dark Knight Rises in how silly it felt. Then what little emotion had been established, especially in the Doctor's threat of Cobb, it thrown completely out the window by Jenny's healing regeneration and liting out into space. That especially felt slapped on and out of place as it felt like she had been completely self aware of everything around her, knowing that the war had ended and that the Doctor had left. What little goodwill I could have had for the death scene was just washed away in that moment.
I hate to be so negative but there was a good amount of potential for this story in the first half and it all just fell apart in the second half. Now, I don't think it's the horrible thing and stinks up the series the way many fans do. It's an ok watch and if you're in the mood for something silly and light, it'll be fine. It's just a whiplash in terms of the tone. I will say that I think it's the worst of the series and if going through, I'd be eagerly looking forward to The Unicorn and the Wasp, which might explain some of the bad feeling on that one too.
Overall personal score: 1.5 out of 5
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Friday, January 12, 2018
Twice Upon a Time
Oh, Brilliant!
At long last we come to the Christmas special, the end of the Twelfth Doctor era and the end of the Steven Moffat tenure. We also get a full edition of David Bradley as the First Doctor, something speculated at ever since An Adventure in Space and Time but only realized now (coinciding with the release of new Big Finish adventures with David Bradley as the First Doctor). The previews have hinted that this will a comedy so I'm not expecting anything as dramatic or as deep as we've seen with the first couple of Twelfth Doctor Christmas specials. Personally, I'm hoping for something closer to The Husbands of River Song rather than The Return of Doctor Mysterio.
Plot Summary
The First Doctor stumbles out of the Cyberman shuttle and towards his TARDIS, determined not to regenerate. As he moves, he hears a voice out of the snow and moves towards it. He sees the Twelfth Doctor struggling to not regenerate but does not realize it’s a future iteration, though he suspects him of being a fellow Time Lord. As the two talk, time suddenly freezes with snowflakes held in the air in suspension.
Out of the mist of frozen fog stumbles a British Captain from World War I. He had been in a shell hole face to face with a German soldier when time froze for him. He had been approached by a transparent female form and then scanned. However, instead of time reverting when she finished, an error occurred and he was thrown forward to the point of the two Doctors meeting.
The two Doctors take him into the TARDIS, although the First Doctor is shocked when he sees that it's not his TARDIS. It is only after seeing this and further interaction with the Twelfth Doctor that he realizes that the Twelfth Doctor is his future self. Before they can continue their discussion, the TARDIS is grabbed by a crane and hoisted up into a ship hovering overhead.
Upon being deposited into the bay, the First Doctor steps out to investigate while the Captain and Twelfth Doctor monitor from the inside. The transparent female silhouette appears, identifying him as the Doctor of War, to which the First Doctor is appalled. The female figure identifies herself and the ship as Testimony and promises to allow the Doctor to visit with someone if he cooperates with them. Bill emerges from a side corridor and the Twelfth Doctor bursts from the TARDIS to greet her.
Enthused as he is to see her, the Twelfth Doctor is suspicious that she is not the real Bill. Bill explains that Testimony travels through time, gathering the thoughts and memories of people just before their death. It had done so with the Captain but an error occurred causing his time jump. Time would remain frozen until he could be returned to his proper location. The two Doctors conduct their own investigation, suspicious of Testimony's motives and the First Doctor notes that the glass form is modeled after a real woman and not computer generated. This means there is a source behind it all.
The two Doctors, the Captain and Bill release the winch holding the TARDIS and shimmy down. Testimony corrects the fault and begins to haul it back up again. But it is still low enough to the ground that they are able to jump to the ground. The group then enters the First Doctor's TARDIS where the Twelfth Doctor feeds it coordinates to follow.
They end up on the planet Villengard, near the center of the universe. The two Doctors head out while Bill and the Captain stay in the TARDIS. Time has unfrozen in this new location and the Doctors come under fire from a tower. The Twelfth Doctor shows himself and tells the occupant to scan him and realize he is already dying. The firing stops and the Twelfth Doctor heads up while the First Doctor stays below.
In the TARDIS, Bill is revealed to a glass figure just as the lead figure of Testimony, but with Bill's memories up until he was transported away with Heather. She calms the Captain and then leaves the TARDIS where she talks with the First Doctor.
In the tower, the Twelfth Doctor finds Rusty, the Dalek he and Clara "healed" so many years ago, now having created a trap to destroy Daleks who come to kill him. He allows the Doctor access to the Dalek database where he learns that Testimony was a project set up by a scientist on New Earth to collect the memories of the departed so that they could learn and archive them. The Twelfth Doctor is shocked to find their is no malicious intent and then notices that time has frozen again.
Bill comes up the stairs, though the Twelfth Doctor still refuses to recognize her as anything but facsimile. But with no evil to thwart, the two Doctors agree that they must return the Captain to his death. The Captain goes with the Twelfth Doctor in his TARDIS to act as a guide for the First Doctor's TARDIS, as the navigation controls haven't been repaired yet. As they near the point of the Captain's death, the Twelfth Doctor gets an idea.
The two TARDISs land and the Doctors promise the Captain to look in on his family for them. He tells them his name is Archibald Lethbridge-Stewart (grandfather of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart) and the Twelfth Doctor promises that they will look on his family quite a bit. As the Captain settles back to his spot, time resumes and he faces down the German across from him. Before either can fire, they are distracted by the sound of singing from the German lines. A few moments later, the British start singing as well. Men from both sides emerge from the trenches and start interacting. The Captain puts down his gun and whistles for a medic. Germans come over and carry the wounded man back to their lines while the Captain's men help him back to their lines. The Twelfth Doctor had come forward in time by a couple hours, dropping the Captain off just before the start of the Christmas truce, saving his life for at least one more day.
Having talked to both the Twelfth Doctor and Bill, the First Doctor elects to face his fear and subject himself to regeneration. He reenters his TARDIS and uses the fast return switch to return to the south pole. He opens the doors briefly to allow Ben and Polly in before reactivating the TARDIS and collapsing to the floor to regenerate.
The Twelfth Doctor continues to watch the truce, unwilling to regenerate, tired from all the fighting and saving that needs to be done. Bill talks to him about his work, changing her appearance to Clara as well for a short time. A second avatar in the form of Nardole also appears. The two avatars, the first having resumed the Bill form, embrace the Doctor and encourage him to keep going. The Doctor walks back into his TARDIS, leaving them behind.
Seeing more trouble on the monitor, the Doctor tries to keep himself motivated, but decides to give himself over to regeneration for "one more go around." He reminds himself of things the Doctor stands for and things to focus on and regenerates into the Thirteenth Doctor.
The Doctor stumbles forward and sees in the monitor that he has become a woman. She is intrigued by this but on trying to take control of the TARDIS, it rebels. The TARDIS rocks violently with the central column exploding. The Doctor falls backwards and is thrown out of the TARDIS. She falls through the air while watching the interior of the TARDIS continue to explode while hovering in midair.
Analysis
I'm having a slightly difficult time processing how I feel about this episode. I did enjoy it, though I think I would have enjoyed it more if it hadn't had all the BBC America commercial breaks inserted in. But for all the run-around that was done, the was very little plot and an even thinner reason to why the Twelfth Doctor was trying to stop his regeneration. It just felt a bit out of place.
It is my understanding that this story was a last minute stopgap. Because of the work on Broadchurch, Chris Chibnall was unable to take over Doctor Who until 2018 so Steven Moffat was asked to produce Series 10 and did a fine job in my opinion. However, Moffat clearly had things wrapped in such a way that the Doctor would regenerate after being mortally wounded as shown in The Doctor Falls. But it seems that Chris Chibnall asked to not start off his tenure with the Christmas episode, preferring to start from scratch with Series 11. That's fine, but you can see the hole that Moffat suddenly found himself in and I'm not sure he quite gets out of it.
I have no problem with the hesitation of the First Doctor in his regeneration. It fits his personality and he has never regenerated before so a fearful defiance and needing to be coaxed along makes sense. The Twelfth Doctor, by contrast, is the first of a new set of regenerations. He has been almost cavalier with regeneration energy in past stories and given his renegade attitude, he would seem to be the most open to giving up and letting the next version come forth.
I'm also unsure how the Twelfth Doctor could be so energetic as he moves around while trying to repress regeneration. He was blasted with the Cybermen energy weapons and essentially had to have Bill restart the regeneration process for him after he blew them and himself up with the level. This feels a bit more like the regeneration that the Tenth Doctor funneled into creating the hand clone Doctor. A wound that bad has to be dealt with and I have trouble seeing how the Twelfth Doctor could allow the regeneration go forward enough to prevent immediate death but then suppress it enough to have an adventure with his prior self. Yes, explanations are offered, but the seem a little thin to me and it just casts a bit of a shadow on the story.
From a performance standpoint, I highly enjoyed it. The Twelfth Doctor was his usual entertaining self, wanting to embrace Bill but also with a simmering anger at Harmony's synthetic Bill trying to justify herself as the original Bill. I really enjoyed his interaction with the First Doctor, who was done as a nice echo of William Hartnell by David Bradley. I enjoyed it, especially the anachronistic jokes made at his expense. I did wish there could have been a bit more emphasis placed on the First Doctor's better qualities as it was easy to let the sexism or curmudgeonism take point.
I did like David Bradley's version of the First Doctor. It is different than William Hartnell but still good. Bradley is softer and less pointed than Hartnell though I felt that Hartnell held a deeper level of emotion. Bradley always felt like someone playing the Doctor while Hartnell simply was the Doctor. They are both good in their own ways and I thought Bradley played well against the Twelfth Doctor.
Bill was enjoyable but I sided with the Twelfth Doctor that she wasn't really Bill. The avatar Bill was always relaxed, calm and confident. Bill as we knew her in Series Ten was always a roil of emotion: excitable and fearful, filled with wonder. This Bill was much closer to the post regeneration by Heather. It was subtle and an excellent job by Pearle Macke but still a different performance than the Bill we know.
Though he didn't do much, I also enjoyed Captain Lethbridge-Stewart as well. He was mostly the object of distress, though not quite the damsel that is typical of this story. I didn't see it coming but I could see the inspiration from the Brigadier once the name was revealed. He was very much the "stiff upper lip" type that you would expect to be the Brig's grandfather and he was fun to be with especially as he slowly rationalized himself to accept his forthcoming death.
The return of Rusty was amusing but it didn't really have a whole lot of point other than as a neat bit of trivia and a place to run to to avoid Harmony. In fact, the lack of a villain was another small point of problem in this story. There are a number of good stories that don't have villains but this one was trying both to have a villain and not a villain at the same time. Harmony came in and they are initially perceived as hostile, though they change to complacent quickly. Then you have Rusty, who is only a villain while shooting at the Doctor. Then he becomes a reluctant ally. So the story was constantly trying to have someone in the villain role but then pulling the rug out from under it. It didn't quite work for me and it gave the overall story a feeling of running around for no real reason.
Like the Tenth Doctor and the departure of Russell T. Davies, I thought the Twelfth Doctor's regeneration was a bit long and self indulgent. I know they wanted to give him a good long speech to have his final say, but I thought it should have been a bit shorter. As entertaining as his final speech to himself was, I thought it would have been more fitting for the Twelfth Doctor to have had a little say and then regenerate after, "Well, what's one more lifetime?" The Twelfth Doctor was arrogant and self possessed but it would have felt more in character to have accepted his fate and left when the decision had been made. As good as the speech was, I thought the moment lost poignancy by lingering as opposed to the Eleventh Doctor's regeneration which gave itself one lingering moment and then moved on.
All that being said, I did enjoy the regeneration and I loved the fact that the Twelfth Doctor's ring dropped off. There was a suspicion that would happen and it was one of those things that was truly symbolic of the passing of the Doctor. I liked the Thirteenth Doctor's appearance and especially the wait for the reveal of her change of sex. I also like that it seems she will keep her native accent, although that could be a problem for me if I'm not fully paying attention. Because of the low tone, I swore she said "Of Berlin" rather than "Oh Brilliant." I'm not sure why the TARDIS took that moment to explode and reject her the way it did but it was reminiscent of the Eleventh Doctor's start so I'll be curious to see what they end up doing with that. I am going to be highly annoyed if the Doctor falls all the way to the ground and then just gets up a la the Tenth Doctor in The End of Time as it would continue to make a mockery of the Fourth Doctor's death in Logopolis but we won't find out until the Fall for that.
Overall, I think I enjoyed it well enough. Moffat's true goodbye was The Husbands of River Song and this was more of an extended coda. Self indulgent and not quite getting out of the holes that had been dug, it was still an enjoyable experience to be with these characters and it gave out the appropriate feels for the season. Most importantly, it whet the appetite for Season Eleven and that's the most important thing.
Overall personal score: 3 out of 5
At long last we come to the Christmas special, the end of the Twelfth Doctor era and the end of the Steven Moffat tenure. We also get a full edition of David Bradley as the First Doctor, something speculated at ever since An Adventure in Space and Time but only realized now (coinciding with the release of new Big Finish adventures with David Bradley as the First Doctor). The previews have hinted that this will a comedy so I'm not expecting anything as dramatic or as deep as we've seen with the first couple of Twelfth Doctor Christmas specials. Personally, I'm hoping for something closer to The Husbands of River Song rather than The Return of Doctor Mysterio.
Plot Summary
The First Doctor stumbles out of the Cyberman shuttle and towards his TARDIS, determined not to regenerate. As he moves, he hears a voice out of the snow and moves towards it. He sees the Twelfth Doctor struggling to not regenerate but does not realize it’s a future iteration, though he suspects him of being a fellow Time Lord. As the two talk, time suddenly freezes with snowflakes held in the air in suspension.
Out of the mist of frozen fog stumbles a British Captain from World War I. He had been in a shell hole face to face with a German soldier when time froze for him. He had been approached by a transparent female form and then scanned. However, instead of time reverting when she finished, an error occurred and he was thrown forward to the point of the two Doctors meeting.
The two Doctors take him into the TARDIS, although the First Doctor is shocked when he sees that it's not his TARDIS. It is only after seeing this and further interaction with the Twelfth Doctor that he realizes that the Twelfth Doctor is his future self. Before they can continue their discussion, the TARDIS is grabbed by a crane and hoisted up into a ship hovering overhead.
Upon being deposited into the bay, the First Doctor steps out to investigate while the Captain and Twelfth Doctor monitor from the inside. The transparent female silhouette appears, identifying him as the Doctor of War, to which the First Doctor is appalled. The female figure identifies herself and the ship as Testimony and promises to allow the Doctor to visit with someone if he cooperates with them. Bill emerges from a side corridor and the Twelfth Doctor bursts from the TARDIS to greet her.
Enthused as he is to see her, the Twelfth Doctor is suspicious that she is not the real Bill. Bill explains that Testimony travels through time, gathering the thoughts and memories of people just before their death. It had done so with the Captain but an error occurred causing his time jump. Time would remain frozen until he could be returned to his proper location. The two Doctors conduct their own investigation, suspicious of Testimony's motives and the First Doctor notes that the glass form is modeled after a real woman and not computer generated. This means there is a source behind it all.
The two Doctors, the Captain and Bill release the winch holding the TARDIS and shimmy down. Testimony corrects the fault and begins to haul it back up again. But it is still low enough to the ground that they are able to jump to the ground. The group then enters the First Doctor's TARDIS where the Twelfth Doctor feeds it coordinates to follow.
They end up on the planet Villengard, near the center of the universe. The two Doctors head out while Bill and the Captain stay in the TARDIS. Time has unfrozen in this new location and the Doctors come under fire from a tower. The Twelfth Doctor shows himself and tells the occupant to scan him and realize he is already dying. The firing stops and the Twelfth Doctor heads up while the First Doctor stays below.
In the TARDIS, Bill is revealed to a glass figure just as the lead figure of Testimony, but with Bill's memories up until he was transported away with Heather. She calms the Captain and then leaves the TARDIS where she talks with the First Doctor.
In the tower, the Twelfth Doctor finds Rusty, the Dalek he and Clara "healed" so many years ago, now having created a trap to destroy Daleks who come to kill him. He allows the Doctor access to the Dalek database where he learns that Testimony was a project set up by a scientist on New Earth to collect the memories of the departed so that they could learn and archive them. The Twelfth Doctor is shocked to find their is no malicious intent and then notices that time has frozen again.
Bill comes up the stairs, though the Twelfth Doctor still refuses to recognize her as anything but facsimile. But with no evil to thwart, the two Doctors agree that they must return the Captain to his death. The Captain goes with the Twelfth Doctor in his TARDIS to act as a guide for the First Doctor's TARDIS, as the navigation controls haven't been repaired yet. As they near the point of the Captain's death, the Twelfth Doctor gets an idea.
The two TARDISs land and the Doctors promise the Captain to look in on his family for them. He tells them his name is Archibald Lethbridge-Stewart (grandfather of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart) and the Twelfth Doctor promises that they will look on his family quite a bit. As the Captain settles back to his spot, time resumes and he faces down the German across from him. Before either can fire, they are distracted by the sound of singing from the German lines. A few moments later, the British start singing as well. Men from both sides emerge from the trenches and start interacting. The Captain puts down his gun and whistles for a medic. Germans come over and carry the wounded man back to their lines while the Captain's men help him back to their lines. The Twelfth Doctor had come forward in time by a couple hours, dropping the Captain off just before the start of the Christmas truce, saving his life for at least one more day.
Having talked to both the Twelfth Doctor and Bill, the First Doctor elects to face his fear and subject himself to regeneration. He reenters his TARDIS and uses the fast return switch to return to the south pole. He opens the doors briefly to allow Ben and Polly in before reactivating the TARDIS and collapsing to the floor to regenerate.
The Twelfth Doctor continues to watch the truce, unwilling to regenerate, tired from all the fighting and saving that needs to be done. Bill talks to him about his work, changing her appearance to Clara as well for a short time. A second avatar in the form of Nardole also appears. The two avatars, the first having resumed the Bill form, embrace the Doctor and encourage him to keep going. The Doctor walks back into his TARDIS, leaving them behind.
Seeing more trouble on the monitor, the Doctor tries to keep himself motivated, but decides to give himself over to regeneration for "one more go around." He reminds himself of things the Doctor stands for and things to focus on and regenerates into the Thirteenth Doctor.
The Doctor stumbles forward and sees in the monitor that he has become a woman. She is intrigued by this but on trying to take control of the TARDIS, it rebels. The TARDIS rocks violently with the central column exploding. The Doctor falls backwards and is thrown out of the TARDIS. She falls through the air while watching the interior of the TARDIS continue to explode while hovering in midair.
Analysis
I'm having a slightly difficult time processing how I feel about this episode. I did enjoy it, though I think I would have enjoyed it more if it hadn't had all the BBC America commercial breaks inserted in. But for all the run-around that was done, the was very little plot and an even thinner reason to why the Twelfth Doctor was trying to stop his regeneration. It just felt a bit out of place.
It is my understanding that this story was a last minute stopgap. Because of the work on Broadchurch, Chris Chibnall was unable to take over Doctor Who until 2018 so Steven Moffat was asked to produce Series 10 and did a fine job in my opinion. However, Moffat clearly had things wrapped in such a way that the Doctor would regenerate after being mortally wounded as shown in The Doctor Falls. But it seems that Chris Chibnall asked to not start off his tenure with the Christmas episode, preferring to start from scratch with Series 11. That's fine, but you can see the hole that Moffat suddenly found himself in and I'm not sure he quite gets out of it.
I have no problem with the hesitation of the First Doctor in his regeneration. It fits his personality and he has never regenerated before so a fearful defiance and needing to be coaxed along makes sense. The Twelfth Doctor, by contrast, is the first of a new set of regenerations. He has been almost cavalier with regeneration energy in past stories and given his renegade attitude, he would seem to be the most open to giving up and letting the next version come forth.
I'm also unsure how the Twelfth Doctor could be so energetic as he moves around while trying to repress regeneration. He was blasted with the Cybermen energy weapons and essentially had to have Bill restart the regeneration process for him after he blew them and himself up with the level. This feels a bit more like the regeneration that the Tenth Doctor funneled into creating the hand clone Doctor. A wound that bad has to be dealt with and I have trouble seeing how the Twelfth Doctor could allow the regeneration go forward enough to prevent immediate death but then suppress it enough to have an adventure with his prior self. Yes, explanations are offered, but the seem a little thin to me and it just casts a bit of a shadow on the story.
From a performance standpoint, I highly enjoyed it. The Twelfth Doctor was his usual entertaining self, wanting to embrace Bill but also with a simmering anger at Harmony's synthetic Bill trying to justify herself as the original Bill. I really enjoyed his interaction with the First Doctor, who was done as a nice echo of William Hartnell by David Bradley. I enjoyed it, especially the anachronistic jokes made at his expense. I did wish there could have been a bit more emphasis placed on the First Doctor's better qualities as it was easy to let the sexism or curmudgeonism take point.
I did like David Bradley's version of the First Doctor. It is different than William Hartnell but still good. Bradley is softer and less pointed than Hartnell though I felt that Hartnell held a deeper level of emotion. Bradley always felt like someone playing the Doctor while Hartnell simply was the Doctor. They are both good in their own ways and I thought Bradley played well against the Twelfth Doctor.
Bill was enjoyable but I sided with the Twelfth Doctor that she wasn't really Bill. The avatar Bill was always relaxed, calm and confident. Bill as we knew her in Series Ten was always a roil of emotion: excitable and fearful, filled with wonder. This Bill was much closer to the post regeneration by Heather. It was subtle and an excellent job by Pearle Macke but still a different performance than the Bill we know.
Though he didn't do much, I also enjoyed Captain Lethbridge-Stewart as well. He was mostly the object of distress, though not quite the damsel that is typical of this story. I didn't see it coming but I could see the inspiration from the Brigadier once the name was revealed. He was very much the "stiff upper lip" type that you would expect to be the Brig's grandfather and he was fun to be with especially as he slowly rationalized himself to accept his forthcoming death.
The return of Rusty was amusing but it didn't really have a whole lot of point other than as a neat bit of trivia and a place to run to to avoid Harmony. In fact, the lack of a villain was another small point of problem in this story. There are a number of good stories that don't have villains but this one was trying both to have a villain and not a villain at the same time. Harmony came in and they are initially perceived as hostile, though they change to complacent quickly. Then you have Rusty, who is only a villain while shooting at the Doctor. Then he becomes a reluctant ally. So the story was constantly trying to have someone in the villain role but then pulling the rug out from under it. It didn't quite work for me and it gave the overall story a feeling of running around for no real reason.
Like the Tenth Doctor and the departure of Russell T. Davies, I thought the Twelfth Doctor's regeneration was a bit long and self indulgent. I know they wanted to give him a good long speech to have his final say, but I thought it should have been a bit shorter. As entertaining as his final speech to himself was, I thought it would have been more fitting for the Twelfth Doctor to have had a little say and then regenerate after, "Well, what's one more lifetime?" The Twelfth Doctor was arrogant and self possessed but it would have felt more in character to have accepted his fate and left when the decision had been made. As good as the speech was, I thought the moment lost poignancy by lingering as opposed to the Eleventh Doctor's regeneration which gave itself one lingering moment and then moved on.
All that being said, I did enjoy the regeneration and I loved the fact that the Twelfth Doctor's ring dropped off. There was a suspicion that would happen and it was one of those things that was truly symbolic of the passing of the Doctor. I liked the Thirteenth Doctor's appearance and especially the wait for the reveal of her change of sex. I also like that it seems she will keep her native accent, although that could be a problem for me if I'm not fully paying attention. Because of the low tone, I swore she said "Of Berlin" rather than "Oh Brilliant." I'm not sure why the TARDIS took that moment to explode and reject her the way it did but it was reminiscent of the Eleventh Doctor's start so I'll be curious to see what they end up doing with that. I am going to be highly annoyed if the Doctor falls all the way to the ground and then just gets up a la the Tenth Doctor in The End of Time as it would continue to make a mockery of the Fourth Doctor's death in Logopolis but we won't find out until the Fall for that.
Overall, I think I enjoyed it well enough. Moffat's true goodbye was The Husbands of River Song and this was more of an extended coda. Self indulgent and not quite getting out of the holes that had been dug, it was still an enjoyable experience to be with these characters and it gave out the appropriate feels for the season. Most importantly, it whet the appetite for Season Eleven and that's the most important thing.
Overall personal score: 3 out of 5
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