The Parting of the Ways

The grand finale for series 1 of Doctor Who, concluding the first round of New Who, is The Parting of the Ways. It is a direct continuation from Bad Wolf, and for the most part they are parts 1 & 2 of a two-part story.

Despite its flaws, which I’ll get to later, this is one of the strongest season-ending stories of the 9th & 10th Doctor era under show-runner Russel T. Davies, and it set the the paradigm that virtually every season ever since would follow: the third-to-last story hints at the ending, the penultimate story sets up the big baddies, and the last story wraps it up in an epic grand sweep with lots of emotion. How do things turn out for the characters in Bad Wolf?

Lynda with a Y bravely takes up a monitoring station, which is inexplicably in a room by itself, conveniently setting her up to be isolated, trapped, and tragically killed. I was bummed to see her go in 2005, and it’s still a sad moment re-watching it now; I’d have enjoyed seeing her escape with the Doctor and be his next traveling companion.

The remaining staff and contestants on the Game Station, having run out of escape pods, are all slaughtered by the daleks. It’s a tragic round, but also necessary from a story-telling perspective – if the one lone dalek in episode 6 was so deadly, the army of them had to be even more deadly, which means setting up more crowds and characters to be exterminated. The fact that there was a crowd people hiding out on floor zero, killed off simply because they were there, also helps solidify the evil of the daleks to the new audience.

Jack continues his role as the action hero, arming and leading what people he could rally and muster to defend against the Daleks. He fights to the death, also to be exterminated at the last. That, too, was a shock, much more unexpected than Lynda’s death.

The Doctor… again, he has an amazing range of emotion to play in this story. At the end of Bad Wolf when the Daleks instruct him to surrender because they have “his associate” (Rose) prisoner, his sharp thrice-given “NO” makes everyone’s blood runs cold. His counter that he would rescue Rose and the Earth and “wipe every stinking dalek out of the sky” brings him back to his fierce Time War Veteran persona that we’ve seen on occasion throughout the series. The opening scenes of this story seems him rapidly rescue Rose, Jack blow up a dalek, and the three of them parley with the Emperor Dalek, who has now styled himself as the God of All Daleks. The religious subtext for the Emperor’s god complex (and what that implies about the Doctor and the human race) continues throughout the story, and sets up for resolution, which is (almost by necessity) a Deus ex machina plot device.

The Doctor then gets some quieter moments, such as Jack’s farewell to him and Rose, and the discussion concerning their potential running away, which Rose hadn’t considered because she’s “just too good.” The Doctor soon realizes something he can do, though, and tricks Rose to send her home. For a Classic Who fan, especially, this was gut-wrenching – the Doctor has many times before wished he could get his companions out of harm’s way, and here he actually pulled the trigger so to speak and shipped her off to safety under the assumption that he was done for. “Have a fantastic life,” he tells her.

So let’s consider Rose now… this is the point in the show where I began to stop liking her as a companion character. Throughout series 2 she was too comfortable with time travel; she’d moved away from being the audience’s eyepiece into the TARDIS and started turning into a one-sided love interest toward the Doctor. But in a way that begins here: she refuses to accept her grounding back home and insists that she has to get back to help him somehow. Her knowledge gained in Boom Town about the TARDIS’ telepathic abilities, with the continued Bad Wolf motif around home, goads her own in this quest. She flat out tells Mickey that there’s “nothing” for her here anymore (so they shouldn’t be a couple anymore, right? <sigh>) and she tells her mother about how good the Doctor was to her in Father’s Day, convincing both of them to help her get the TARDIS console open so she can take it back to rescue the Doctor.

In my honest (and likely minority) opinion, this should have been the end of Rose’s character arc. She could have stayed home, had a good life, applying those positive lessons that she told her mum and Mickey that she’d learned from the Doctor. Maybe their efforts to open the TARDIS could have caused it to return to the Doctor alone, who knows. But instead her obsession for the Doctor and for traveling with him is fed, and she returns, one with the TARDIS, a self-created Bad Wolf that seeds clues for herself throughout her personal past in order to ensure this moment happens.

The resolution of The Parting of the Ways is where the mixed bag comes in. The Doctor refuses to fire his makeshift Delta Wave which would indiscriminately destroy all life forms on and near Earth, human and dalek alike; he cites that he’s a coward, not a killer. This is a key character moment for him showing us that despite whatever horrors he’d committed during the Time War, he is no longer that man; he is the Doctor once again. But then Bad Wolf Rose shows up and atomizes the entire Dalek fleet and brings Jack Harkness back to life. The Doctor then kisses the Time Vortex energy out of her and blows it back into the TARDIS console, and even though he had hardly twenty seconds of exposure to it, he’s the one who dies from it while Rose is fine, minus a little temporary amnesia. This is the Deus ex machina that has always sat uncomfortably with me, almost ruining an otherwise excellent series finale. Maybe one can speculate that Rose was merely “merged” with the Vortex energy while the Doctor actually “controlled” it, and that’s why it’s fatal to him instead of her, but the lack of in-story clarification as to what just happened in that critical scene is forever a frustration. Maybe the writer will novelise it someday, and clean that up a bit.

The other slight disappointment is the threat to Earth: we are told by Lynda that “whole continents” are being bombed – Europa, the North American Alliance, Australasia – gone. The destruction and loss of life must be unimaginable… didn’t the Doctor say over 60 billion people lived on Earth 100 years previously? But apart from one or two lines of dialogue, and map of neon lines getting squiggly, we knowing nothing of this catastrophe. The shots of dalek armies flying through space are cool, and I’m sure daleks blowing stuff up on Earth in the year 200100 would have been well beyond budget, but something more would have been helpful to better capture the gravity of the dalek threat. And besides, why were they still in hiding anyway? With that many warships and literally zero resistance offered from the planet, the Daleks could have accomplished this any time in the past 100 years. Yeah, they’re playing it safe, but this is a pretty extreme long-wait stratagem even for Time-War-recovery-era daleks.

Finally, the Doctor regenerates. As a Classic Who fan, again, this was very special. We knew what was coming (minus the question of what the special effects would be this time), and it was unique just how much the Doctor was able to prepare Rose for the big moment. (It’s also interesting to note that this is the first standing-up regeneration we’ve seen for the Doctor, and curious that every New Who regeneration has continued in this vein.) He is given a heart-felt sendoff without going over the top (as most subsequent regenerations have done), and the series is brought to bittersweet close.

On the whole, series 1 is probably the most solid of any. Every single episode contributes a character, theme, or concept that is used elsewhere in the series; nothing is purely ‘filler.’ The Bad Wolf series-arc-mystery was woven in subtly, and attention was not brought to it until just before it became important. The Doctor and his companion both get character arcs, backstories, and interactions with other (temporary) companions and recurring characters. It showed Classic Who fans that our old beloved TV show can live again in the 21st century, and it started gathering whole new generations of fans. Personally, the loss of the 9th Doctor was a tough experience back in 2005, to the point that I never quite took to the 10th with the same affection of most of the rest of the fast-growing fandom. I wished for more stories with the 9th, and couldn’t be happier, almost 16 years later, to see Eccleston return to the role in audio form.

Bad Wolf

The final story of series 1 was technically a two-parter, but its two parts are so different in tone and style that they merit separate entries where I would normally combine them. Bad Wolf is, at first, a parody of contemporary gameshows and reality television. The same premises remain (particularly showcasing The Weakest Link and Big Brother), but they have been further twisted: contestants who don’t make it to the end are actually killed. The Doctor, Rose, and Jack, having been kidnapped from the TARDIS by an extraordinarily powerful transmat beam, each learn shockingly, in turn, just how brutal these games can be.

The Doctor picks up a temporary would-be companion almost immediately, Lynda with a Y. She’s sweet, and (so I’ve always thought) a really likeable character that would have been lovely to see travel with him thereafter. They, and Jack Harkness, break out of their respective games and rush to rescue Rose from the Ann-Droid, only to see her disintegrated at the last second. The direction of that scene was brilliantly handled: the action continues in the “background” as Jack yells PG-13 obscenities, security arrives, and arrests them, but the dramatic music largely drowns that out while the camera focuses on the grief-stricken Doctor. The audience shares his shock at Rose’s apparent death events just happen around him and us for a minute. After things quiet down, this trio escapes custody, arms themselves to the teeth, and storm Floor 500 of what the Doctor recognizes as Satellite Five, where the story The Long Game took place. He learns, through Lynda’s exposition, that the past 100 years has been hell for Earth; when he made the news go offline the entire planet stopped, and society and government collapsed. It’s a hard blow for the Doctor and a bit of a shock for the audience, too – especially Classic Who fans as we are dared to wonder how many other of the Doctor’s past exploits resulted in worsened conditions for the locals?

It soon becomes apparent, through dialogue with the Game Station’s Controller, that there is a more sinister force at work behind the scenes, present for hundreds years, and thus responsible not only for these insane games but also for installing the Jagrafess over a century earlier. This was an excellent mystery-upon-mystery, heightening the drama as we move from one level of situation-awareness to the next. Unfortunately, very unfortunately, both of the major reveals in this story are spoiled from the outset. The introduction of Bad Wolf involves a complete recap of the events of The Long Game, giving the audience knowledge that is somehow a sequel, and tipping off the idea that this is taking place on Satellite Five several minutes before the Doctor learns it. And, worst of all, the reveal that the Daleks are involved was spoiled in the blooming trailer for Bad Wolf at the end of the previous story! I mean, sure, throwing the daleks in there was great for hype, but it almost completely ruins the would-be-excellent reveal in the final scenes of this story. Such a missed opportunity.

Lynda is sweet; Rose is flabbergasted; the Doctor is alternately grumpy, determined, heart-broken, and relentless; it’s actually Jack Harkness who drives forward much of the narrative, curiously enough. In Boom Town he was a mix of comic relief and technobabble. Here, he returns to his flirtatious nature (we are treated to the first two “Hi, Captain Jack Harkness” pickup lines that the Doctor swats away in dialogue) as well something of the dashing action hero. He pulls a gun concealed “where you don’t want to know”, shoots his way out, gets a bigger gun, leads the prison break, finds the TARDIS, and discovers the disintegrator beams are actually transmats. He gets the Big Relief role of telling the Doctor that Rose is still alive.

We also get a “Bad Wolf” recap early in this story, just in case the Doctor’s comment about it in the previous story didn’t work for the audience. Not everyone discussed it on the internet or went back to re-watch previous episodes to find the Bad Wolf references, so here we get Rose’s recollection of three or four Bad Wolf sightings (even though the one from Dalek would not have been known to her). This is where the Doctor makes his comment about “The Long Game” (thus fully justifying the earlier episode by that name), and yet we still don’t quite know what or who the Bad Wolf is… we’re led to assume it’s the Daleks’ cover name, but that has yet to be revealed.

The massive meta-narrative issues of spoilers aside, there are moments for the Doctor Who fan to appreciate. Even with the daleks spoiled a week and 40 minutes too early, there are still some wonderful build-ups to their appearance. After learning that Rose is still alive, the scene cuts to her on the floor, and the same old ambient soundeffect that’s been used for dalek ships since the 1960’s is bleeping away – giving us Classic Who fans another rush of pride and nostalgia, knowing that New Who in 2005 is continuing to build upon the legacy we’d known and loved. Seeing first through the Dalek’s eye stalk, and its plunger prodding Rose back, was reminiscent of the first-ever dalek scene in 1963. Then a dalek’s reflection on a shiny surface continued the tease – we know it’s them but the visuals keep holding back until a bigger moment: there is not just one dalek with Rose, but hundreds of them. This was the first time ever that a Doctor Who story had both the budget and the technology to give us a realistic army of daleks in a single shot, and it was memorable!

But those moments are only a little more than fan service; Bad Wolf could have been a fantastic reveal story had the show kept its cards closer to its chest in the previews.

Boom Town

It’s a close call, but Boom Town is probably my favorite story in series 1 of Doctor Who. From first two stories of the series, it was clear that New Who was both a continuation of Classic Who and a distinctly modern television show. And the episode Dalek clinched the Doctor’s radically new backstory and situation. But what really brought the maturation of the Doctor Who franchise inescapably before my attention was episode 11: Boom Town.

On the face of it, this was a return to a couple elements from earlier episode that didn’t seem like they needed revisiting. The Slitheen family from Aliens of London and World War Three were an unnecessarily silly bunch of bad guys, and the past few stories, explicit by the time The Empty Child aired, seemed to have comfortably put Mickey Smith in the past. And yet here we are, showing up in Cardiff meeting up with “Margaret” and Mickey.

The scenario is pretty straight-forward. The interdimensional rift previously encountered in Cardiff is going to be harnessed by the last member of the Slitheen family on Earth; she has gotten herself elected Mayor of Cardiff and has already gotten a nuclear power station planned and approved (in only six months!?) which is designed to go into meltdown, tearing open the rift and destroying the planet. She would ride the shockwave with a tribo-physical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator “all the way to freedom.” After a brief and comical confrontation & chase sequence, “Margaret” is captured and imprisoned in the TARDIS for the night until it has recharged sufficiently to depart. The plan is to return her to her home planet, even though she will be executed there.

There is a scene in the TARDIS at this point where she insists that the four of them (the Doctor, Rose, Mickey, and Jack) are effectively her executioners in delivering her to her people. If any of them had a better-developed sense of moral theology, though, they’d have been able to refute this more easily, if not necessarily feel a lot better about it. Whateverso, the Doctor allows her a last meal, and off the two of them go. She tries to kill him twice, and he immediately shuts down both attempts, cool and savvy as ever. It’s like a scene when River Song is trying to trick the 7th Doctor into a memory-loss scheme to preserve the timeline, and he just won’t have it. This gives us a glimpse of the 9th Doctor’s ability to plan, prepare, use his vast knowledge to its full advantage – he probably was a lot more like the 7th Doctor than we might have realized, except that he was on a recovery path rather than a darkening path. Their date is cut short when her Extrapolator hijacks the TARDIS’s power supply and all hell breaks loose.

What really makes this story great, however, is the conversation between the Doctor and “Margaret” the Slitheen. She calls him out so perfectly: “From what I’ve seen of your happy-go-lucky lifestyle, you leave devastation in your wake… always moving forward ‘cos you dare not look back.” This was a level of introspection that we rarely saw or heard in Classic Who. This is the show recognizing with a newfound maturity one of the major side-effects with the Doctor – he almost never has to deal with consequences. This is not the first story where the Doctor returns to a previous villain or location and deals with the mess of what he’d left behind (there is the occasional return or revisit) but the show’s self-awareness of this particular weakness of the Doctor’s hit a new level for me when I first saw this back in 2005. Consequences! I exclaimed, maybe even aloud. This whole series is about consequences! The whole exploration of Rose’s interaction with her mother and quasi-ex-boyfriend after her first TARDIS trips (the consequences of her leaving home), the Doctor living with the consequences of the Time Wars, and now this microcosm of the entire show in Boom Town where the Doctor has to revisit a previous foe and bring her to justice… it’s all about the thorny subject of consequences. More on that in the next story, too…. oof.

There were also some poignant considerations of the mind of the killer – sometimes you let one go; that’s how you live with yourself. I wasn’t convinced at the time, but I later appreciated the implication on the Doctor at this juncture: he is a killer, no matter how unwilling he usually is.

Outside of that conversation, the Slitheen is a bit campy and a little over-the-top. She’s not a major foe in the history of Doctor Who, and that’s fine.

Jack Harkness is… mostly comic relief in this story. He’s “Captain of the Innuendo Squad” for a bit, but he legitimately makes all the other three laugh with his stories – there are moments were even Mickey fits in with them.

But ultimately the plotline between Mickey and Rose is awkward. Their relationship status seems to be more positive, then more negative, and in the end he seems to leave her even when she (finally) remembers to look for him. At this point, he’s making the right call; he needs to get out of that relationship; she’s just using him, or playing with him, now. But breakups are often awkward, and this story captures that awkwardness for sure, even if it wasn’t pleasant to watch.

The early series of New Who were generally too bombastic and silly for my taste, on the whole, but Boom Town is a story that shows us that, despite the silliness, there can also be serious and thoughtful truths being treated at the same time. It’s a high point in series 1 on that front, and remains my favorite or second-favorite story from 2005.

P. S. – Ah yes, this is also the story that introduced the Bad Wolf arc directly. People who weren’t watching it in 2005 may not know this, but there was an online component to series 1 that unfolded in real time as each story aired. The website that Clyde (in the first episode) had made which enabled Rose to find him was a website in real life, and it came to be run by Mickey Smith, updated with “findings” based on the various stories in the series. The Bad Wolf motif crept in along the way, and Boom Town is when the Doctor first calls it out as a recurring phrase throughout their travels, causing us viewers to scramble back to the previous stories to find all those Bad Wolf easter eggs. It was a pretty cool week, especially with the next story being called “Bad Wolf”. Something crazy cool was building, and we were eager to figure it out.

The Empty Child & The Doctor Dances

Episodes 8 & 9 of series 1 bring us what is probably the best-loved story of the 9th Doctor’s airtime: The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances.

After a few reasonably brutal stories where the Doctor’s solution was to get the bad guy killed or allow the good guy to die, we are treated to a two-parter which reverses the emotional tone entirely. Instead of a fun-filled story with a brutal ending, or a somber story with a heart-breaking ending, we get a mix of spookiness, mystery, and comedy with a fantastically joyful ending. Just when the viewer might be thinking that this new Doctor Who show is kind of dark, we get what may be the 9th Doctor’s happiest moment ever on screen.

Against the trend, this isn’t my favorite story in series 1; I reserve that place to a tie between Dalek and Boom Town (more on that tomorrow!), but I very much respect the significance of The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances both in the Doctor’s character arc and in the progression of the series itself.

Jamie, the boy with the gas mask looking for his mummy and exhibiting strange powers, is one of the iconic spooky images of the early series of New Who. The mystery of “physical injury as plague” overtaking Albion Hospital and spreading through the local military too is frightening – the special effects are not gruesome, but they are grotesque, watching the gas mask emerge from someone’s face. It’s a good thing that we only get one full-on look at it, a “look away” when it happens a second time, and a partial side view for the third… scary things often lose their impact when repeated too many times.

And then there’s the introduction of Captain Jack Harkness. There are, of course, elements of Rose being attracted to him and (silently) admitting she considers herself “footloose and fancy-free, VERY available”, and a sort of jealousy subplot as the Doctor is annoyed over this and distrustful of him, but it isn’t played our too hard. That would have gotten tiresome quickly. Instead, the Doctor’s directness with Jack allows him to crumble pretty quickly, admitting his space-ship-selling scheme is a dirty con. And with enough berating about Jack’s involvement and the nanogenes he unwittingly released on the local populace, Jack actually develops from a self-interested con-man into someone willing to sacrifice his life to correct his mistake. It’s easy to forget this in light of later events, but at the end of this story he has scooped up a bomb, saving the lives of everyone else in the story. Granted, he didn’t know that he was dooming his ship and himself, but he took it retiringly. Just this brief night in the Doctor and Rose’s company set Jack on a new trajectory. If he had been a one-off character, his arc would have been satisfying enough. But it is, I think most of us agree, wonderful that the Doctor rescued him and took him with them. Now Adam has a replacement in someone who has already showed signs of positive reform.

It’s also interesting to note that the Doctor hints that he was responsible for the destruction of the weapons factory that produced Jack’s blaster. I didn’t notice this in the previous 15 years, but this year I caught that line of dialogue when the Doctor mentions he’d been there. Jack calls it into question later, and the Doctor replies “Yes, once“, with a finality that indicates his responsibility for its destruction and replacement with a banana grove. This gives us (and Jack) a brief and subtle glance into the Doctor’s previous exploits, indicating that he is not a man to be trifled with.

Go to your room. Those would have been terrible last words, yes. But instead they make for an excellent start for the second episode of the story. And it’s a much-needed comedic moment. The threat up to that point was spooky and immediate, but reason for the threat, and its far-reaching consequences, were yet to be revealed. So the pacing is very careful. It’s similar with the technology discovered throughout the story: Jack uses nanogenes to heal Rose’s rope burn early on, so by the time they’re revealed to be the culprit behind the Empty Child’s condition the audience is well-prepared to understand and accept the sci-fi explanation. One of the issues of some of Moffat’s later stories is that his story resolutions would be too rushed and difficult to understand on the fly, but in this story it’s well under control. The audience has ample time to take everything in.

Everybody lives. This is one of the most perfect story endings in Doctor Who. The Doctor’s joy is intensely cathartic on several levels: a dark and spooky story is given a complete relief and release; a growing body count is completely undone; a war-weary Doctor still haunted by the unimaginable loss at the end of the Last Great Time War finally gets “a day like this”, when everybody lives. His joy, ecstatically portrayed by Christopher Eccleston, pays off his own character arc thus far, along with this story for the characters involved and for the audience.

Revolution of the Daleks

The New Year’s Day special at the start of 2021 brought us the resolution to the cliff-hanger ending of The Timeless Children, in which the Doctor was somehow captured from within her TARDIS and imprisoned for no clear reason by the Judoon – presumably as a holdover from Fugitive of the Judoon since she and Ruth both identified as the Doctor to them. Along with those connections, this story also serves as a sequel to Resolution from the previous New Year’s Day. So there was a lot to resolve, one might say. Heh.

As memory serves, Resolution the previous year was a cool story, but was actually two very different stories smashed into one episode. Revolution of the Daleks suffers from a similar issue, with several stories that could be quite interesting getting crammed into one… except this time the tonal difference between the different plot lines are not so jarring, so the overall effect is generally more enjoyable than Resolution. I think Stubagful has the best idea here: this story should have been a mini-series of maybe 5 episodes, allowing each thread to breath and come to full fruition.

one of the official promo pics

So, in not-quite-chronological order…

Plot #1: The Doctor is in prison!

This was the big cliff-hanger last year, and it was unclear from the scant trailers and previews how much time would be spent with the Doctor in prison. It was sadly brief – only one good scene of her there. It was cool to see a number of familiar faces in prison with her, that’s the sort of easy-breezy fan service that one expects in stories like this. And while Jodie Whittaker did give us a great portrayal of a Doctor resigned to surviving her incarceration, it was still far too short for the gravity of her misfortune to sink in. The novel Seeing I, for example, shows us the long-term effects of the Doctor being incarcerated – trying to escape, failing, trying to work out what’s going on and how to get out of it, and nearly going mad in the end. Revolution of the Daleks just skips over all of that, which is quite a lost opportunity if you ask me. Not that one would.

Plot #2: Yaz trying to rescue the Doctor

Again we are given approximately one beautiful scene in which Graham check in on Yasmin, who is desperately trying to work out how to operate the TARDIS they’d used to escape Gallifrey. Nobody knows if the Doctor survived the life-killing device on Gallifrey, and Yaz is convinced that the Doctor is alive and needs rescue. The console and walls are littered with notes and diagrams as Yaz has spent essentially the entire past year obsessively trying to figure out how to go back for the Doctor. We do get to see some fallout between her and the Doctor as this quest is brought to a sudden end when the Doctor returns, and Jack Harkness actually gets a wonderful conversation with Yaz about enjoying time with the Doctor when it’s there and moving on when it’s done, but, again, this line is over and done with so very quickly.

Plot #3: the Dalek Scout is being duplicated

In terms of runtime and related events, this ends up being the central story. The Dalek Scout from Resolution was indeed killed, but its travel machine is stolen by Robertson’s company and the technology somewhat copied and manufactured for ground-based security drones. This, too, is a good idea, which this time actually gets explored. Robertson isn’t a likeable character – he’s not supposed to be – but it’s handy to have him reappear after Arachnids in the UK because it means he and the TARDIS crew already know each other; it’s expedient for the already-overstuffed story.

And there is even an excellent red herring: the Doctor believes that Robertson is working with the Daleks, but he isn’t. He legitimately knows nothing about the Dalek Scout, cloned from a tissue sample in the original recovered casing. And that is good for his character development: he’s not entirely the bad guy, he’s just a bad dude. He is not happy to have been used and circumvented, and this puts him on the same side as the Doctor – for a while.

Plot #4: the Clone Daleks’ Masterplan

Needless to say, those clone daleks are up to no good. They have like one human stooge they dispense with as soon as he’s no longer needed. It is surprisingly scary – again – seeing daleks at work without their casings. This is something that has almost never been done, so it’s nice to be able to say that Chibnall has given us something new with the Dalek threat. Anyway, they have put together a plan to inhabit the security drone daleks, replacing the AI software that Robertson’s company runs them with, and thus take over the world. This is a real threat, and a well-executed plan, tying in well as a foil to the development of the in-universe British government’s police state: it goes horribly wrong and the human baddies quickly become among the first victims.

Plot #5: Dalek Civil War

Straight out of the Big Finish story Blood of the Daleks, we have a scenario here of “real” Daleks coming in to exterminate their impure copies. These Daleks have a better case than the ones in the audio play because these are, at least, clones of an original dalek, rather than humans mutated into daleks, but the premise is the same: the Doctor can rely on the Daleks’ genetic purism (or racism, really) to use them to wipe out all the Earth-made daleks. She and Jack call this “the nuclear option”, and it is a surprisingly brutal plan coming from this Doctor. This further cements my opinion that the 13th Doctor is New Who’s 5th Doctor: a more mild-mannered, cheerful, vulnerable persona, with a hidden steel that occasionally pops up in the face of the worst opponents. The Doctor takes this a step further when she uses the second TARDIS to lure, trap, and destroy the real daleks after they’ve dealt with the Earth-made daleks.

In a touch of irony that I personally really enjoyed, Robertson tries to make a deal with the real daleks, preparing to sell out all of Earth for his own gain by their side. When this doesn’t work, he still manages to survive and take popular credit for defeating them. I don’t get the impression that he’s a fan favorite antagonist, but I think this was a brilliant re-use and development of his character, and I wouldn’t actually mind seeing him pop up again for a third time.

Plot #6: Ryan and Graham preparing to leave the Doctor

Technically, everyone left the Doctor already, but the audience knows they’ll be reunited in this story, plus the audience knew the announcement that these two companions would be leaving the show at this point. And so there is a subplot along the way of these two characters sort of unweaving themselves from the Doctor’s life, preparing to step out into their own lives on Earth. Unlike Yasmin, they’ve been settling into ordinary life throughout the past year (not that 2020 in real life was a great year to settle back into the ordinary) and are primed to say goodbye to the Doc at the end of this story.

Graham has a good farewell, as I recall, but Ryan had a really painful conversation with the Doctor midway through the story. He went on about how unfair it was that she’d been MIA for so many months, but he (and everyone else) completely ignored the fact that the Doctor said she’d been in a prison for at least EIGHTEEN YEARS. Or was it 19? It was a much longer time than their wait, and their lack of response to that information, or sensitivity to the Doctor’s ordeal (not to mention the loss of Gallifrey AGAIN) was actually quite aggravating.

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At the end of the day, there are many things I wish this story could have done better, expanded upon, or accomplished differently. Ideally the ideas in this story should have been half a series, told in 5 hours instead of one. But it is what it is, and it’s good to see closure for Graham and Ryan. It’s fun to see Jack Harkness back for real this time, and being a heart-to-heart character rather than just action and/or comedic relief. And it’s cool to see daleks shooting each other, causing explosions, and the Doctor ruthlessly outwitting them. It’s an entertaining story, which is all that matters in the moment. Its positive legacy and memory after the fact is limited, though. But hopefully series 13 will improve a bit more!?

Fugitive of the Judoon

Here we hit the half-way point of series 12, so if the series arc is going to get some advancement, this is the time to do it.  And, oh boy, does it ever.  I went into Fugitive of the Judoon with a little trepidation, having waited until Tuesday to watch it and resultantly getting spoiled on one of the big reveals of the episode.  On the plus side, that meant I was going in with a sense of worry and (frankly) expecting to be very let down, which meant that I was actually pleasantly surprised with how everything was handled.

The core of the story is very simple: the Judoon are after a fugitive and have locked down the city of Worcester to find their quarry.  The Doctor takes exception to this behavior, and the technology the Judoon are using, and butts in to sort things out before the two deaths shown on screen are added to.  But what really takes up the bulk of the runtime is far more involved than that.

spoilers after the picture

First of all, Capt. Jack Harkness appears, using a scoop (or time scoop!?) to pull Graham off Earth to his (stolen) ship.  As the both the head of MI6 and the Master did in Spyfall, now Jack also assumes incorrectly that Graham is the Doctor.  It would be a lame rehash of the same old joke except for the fact that Jack has a much more – err – affectionate approach to greeting his old friend than the others did.  And it’s delightfully predictable.  (And I’m impressed at how little John Barrowman has aged since we last saw him on screen.  He looks exactly the same to me.)

Eventually Jack also scoops up Ryan and Yasmin, but only after they serve their purpose in backing up the Doctor in her investigation of the two potential fugitives of the Judoon: Ruth and Lee.  Neither Ruth nor Lee seem to believe themselves anything other than human, until eventually Lee gives his life to protect Ruth and somehow the Judoon are tipped off to realizing that their fugitive is actually Ruth.  A text message from Lee to Ruth (before his death) gives her a moment of superhuman knowledge and ability, leading the Doctor to help her return to her parents’ home, where the Doctor digs up a Police Box and Ruth inadvertently restores her memories of herself.

This is the spoiler that was all over the internet by Tuesday morning: Ruth is the Doctor.  Knowing this going into the episode, I was able to appreciate a couple subtle pointers in that direction: her staring at her watch in the very first scene, the TARDIS blue hands on her watch, the hexagonal mirror in her flat which looks like the “hexagonal things” in most of the New Who Doctors’ TARDISes.

What proves interesting is that neither the 13th Doctor nor the Ruth Doctor recognize each other as their own past.  The internet chatter I’ve seen indicates that a lot of people are assuming this new face to be a suppressed incarnation between the 2nd and the 3rd, as there’s already a continuity point that the 2nd Doctor was made to work for the Celestial Intervention Agency, so perhaps they even got an entire incarnation in there, doing their dirty work and retaining no memory of it when they were done with her.  This makes sense, but the 2nd Doctor did have a sonic screwdriver, so the Ruth Doctor should have recognized the name of the sonic screwdriver, if not the 13th Doctor’s version of the device.  This indicates that Ruth could be an alternate 2nd Doctor from a messed-up timeline.  The 13th Doctor did note, at the end of this story, that “time is swirling around” her, and that something is after her.  So perhaps this is an aborted timeline or a rewritten history that she has just crossed paths with, rather than an actual insertion into Doctor Who canon and chronology.  After all, the War Doctor was a special case – there was a continuity gap between the 8th Doctor movie and the 9th Doctor in the renewed show, which Moffatt simply filled in for the 50th anniversary.  This situation would be an unprecedented (not to mention extremely forced) insertion into established canon.  So I’m sticking with the theory of a messed-up timeline for now.

The 13th Doctor doesn’t quite get to the point of admitting the destruction of Gallifrey to her companions at the end, but she does indicate that she’s been looking for the Master in between adventures with them, and that something big is coming.  They also report to her Jack Harkness’ message about a ‘Lone Cyberman’ who must not be appeased ‘at any cost’ lest their fallen empire be rebuilt.  Apparently this is a matter that threatens the entire universe.

This doesn’t (on the face of it) add to the Timeless Child story arc, but rather adds more questions to the fray.  But as series arc-unfolding goes this is a satisfying move.  There has been a sense of coherence since episode 1, and although the mystery is not any closer to being solved yet, we’re not simply getting repeats of the ‘Mystery Box’ trope that has been the character of most of the previous seasons of New Who.

So, despite my concern, this has turned out to be quite the intriguing episode, and I hope its mysteries and questions do get explained satisfactorily in time.

Night of the Whisper

The story, Night of the Whisper, is sort of a monumental story.  It’s the first new 9th Doctor story since 2005 (even including the novels).  It’s the first real foray into New Who by Big Finish (albeit in tandem with the company AudioGo which went out of business within months).  It’s the first audio adventure for the 9th Doctor, or Rose or Jack Harkness.  And, to the rejoicing of many fans, this was the first of many.  (Though I’m still waiting for Christopher Eccleston’s heart to soften so he himself can finally reprise his role as the Doctor with Big Finish…)  Just hearing the 2005 version of the theme music brought joy to my heart!

As with the previous stories in the Destiny of the Doctor series, this one captures the spirit of Doctor Who from the era its Doctor originated – in this case, 2005.  Based upon internal clues, like Rose’s ability to say Raxacoricofallapatorius, this story takes place between Boom Town and The Long Game.  It takes place in New Vegas, a domed colony on an airless moon.  There is a vigilante justicar known as The Whisper, going about punishing wrongdoers with increasing vindictiveness, eventually even killing simple graffiti artists.  Rose is working as a waitress in a casino, Jack is posing as a reporter, and the Doctor has faked his credentials to take on the role of an Earth-authorized investigator to assist the police, and they’ve been at this for something like a month, tracking down The Whisper.

The identity of this masked and caped vigilante of modern legend is tied to some family backstories and violent gangster machinations, mixed with cybernetic alien influences and a police officer’s embarrassing secret.  As in Shockwave, the Doctor’s mission is to make sure a key person (the main police officer character) survives, and like in that story, things really come down to the wire in terms of whether the Doctor will be able to succeed at this.

Writing and performing a story for the 9th Doctor must be the hardest of them all.  He’s got the shortest run-time on television, and no tradition of novels or audio adventures to supplement or develop that incarnation’s portrayal, so in order to introduce a new story for him it really has to feel like series 1 in 2005.  The writers (who seem to have a long history of collaboration) did an excellent job at this, and Nick Briggs’ voice acting provides an adequately convincing approximation of Eccleston’s voice.  The accent is obviously (even to me) not right much of the time, but it’s a recognizable imitation.  And, considering the rest of these stories are read by the actor or actress of a companion character, it would be unfair to demand perfectionism anyway.

To be honest, I went into this story with a mix of excitement and trepidation; I really enjoyed the 9th Doctor, and I didn’t want this story to mess things up.  And you know what?  I think this has convinced me that it’s worth putting The Ninth Doctor Chronicles on my wish list.