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Reviewing Modern Who: Regenerative Disorder

Twice Upon A Time. We’re back! Last time on Doctor Who, the Doctor got beat up by some Cybermen and decided not to regenerate. He then landed on the South Pole and ran into the Doctor (the first one!), who had been beat up by some Cybermen and is deciding not to regenerate. Okay! As they’re having this conversation, time freezes and a World War One army captain who turns out to be the Brigadier’s dad shows up and asks if one of them happens to be a doctor. “Are you trying to be funny?” says Twelve. He isn’t.

Anyway, it turns out there’s a group of seemingly-sinister-but-not-actually time travelers called Testimony who go around extracting people’s memories at the point of their death so they can have their memories uploaded or downloaded or whatever into some glass avatars, thus creating a sort of artificial afterlife. For some reason instead of opening with “hey we’re just trying to do a nice thing for the living” they act all sinister, so the Doctors escape and go to see Rusty, the Dalek the Doctor turned good from all the way back in Season 8, and convince him to explain that Testimony isn’t bad after all by tapping into the Dalek hivemind, which knows everything I guess.

Meanwhile the First Doctor finds out that the Twelfth Doctor is all about meddling in things, and also that a lot of violence happens around him, which probably shouldn’t be a surprise given how often he himself has ended up meddling already, but whatever it’s thematically about the Doctor coming to terms with the future and the fact that he is a hero throughout time and space. 

There’s also a scene where Testimony!Bill (Bill’s back, and she’s a glass lady!) asks the First Doctor what he was running to instead of what he was running from (which was almost word for word a shitty job interview question I got once when I was interviewing at one of those shitty sales companies) and he’s like “I wanted to figure out why good prevails in the universe since goodness is basically all about leaving yourself vulnerable” which . . . could have maybe been explored better but the point of it was that Testimony!Bill (henceforth TB) then plants the idea that maybe the Doctor is the reason good prevails.

Anyway, this whole time the Testimony was just trying to extract the Captain’s memories then dump him back in WW1 so he can die, and the Doctor is like “ok but let me take him there” and he messes with the timeline a little bit so he lands just before the Christmas Armistice where both sides just spontaneously have a truce and sing songs and play football and generally have a good time not killing each other, so he’s saved. Then the First Doctor decides he’ll actually regenerate and the Twelfth Doctor is like “still haven’t made up my mind,” so TB gives him back his Clara memories and also summons Testimony!Nardole who give him a hug and then literally dematerialize in his arms which is a little on the nose, then the Doctor goes inside and decides that one more lifetime won’t kill anyone. He flies off into the sky, gives a speech, and regenerates into Jodie Whittaker. She then hits a button and the TARDIS bursts into flames and kicks her out so she starts falling down to the earth below. She’s going to be falling for a while, I think.

Overall this was a nice sendoff. The opening was a bit question mark but the ending was pretty solid, and that’s what we all came here for, right? B+

The Twelfth Doctor. And so we bid farewell to Peter Capaldi! Early Capaldi was rough times, mostly because the writing was kind of a mess, but the writers eventually find their stride and Capaldi himself is phenomenal through and through (especially once Season 8, the Worst Season Of Doctor Who, is over) and shows great development (especially once Season 8, the Worst Season Of Doctor Who, is over). He’s really able to sell the idea of the Doctor as an old wanderer who’s seen several lifetimes worth of pain and heartache, but keeps going because in the end the one thing that drives him is kindness, because he just can’t sit by when someone needs help.

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Reviewing Doctor Who: What Have We Learned, Class?

Now that I’ve watched every Doctor Who there is to watch, you may be surprised to learn that I have some opinions! So, since you’re all here, I suppose I may as well share.

The Classic Era. You know that old cliche about the one constant characteristic of Doctor Who being change? It’s absolutely correct. It started its life as a low-budget show about a grumpy old man with a very inaccurate time machine and became . . . a lot of different things over the years. But it started to feel like Doctor Who pretty early on in its run--much like the character of the Doctor, the themes and faces change, but there is a core idea that never quite goes away.

As such, it’s hard to give the classic era one defining trait--each Doctor is very different from most of the others--but I think it’s safe to say that characters are handled differently. In the classic era, character arcs are less of a thing. We seldom meet the friends and family of our companions, and there are very few character-driven stories. That’s not to say there aren’t excellent characters and excellent character dynamics, but the focus is generally elsewhere. (There are, of course, exceptions.)

The interesting thing is how casual this makes some of the companions’ departures. Modern Who won’t let a companion leave without giving them a whole climactic episode (and Moffat won’t let a companion leave without having them pretend to leave six times, then have them seem to leave forever only to come back and travel through space and time with some random interstellar badass); in contrast, many of the companion departures in classic Who are fairly abrupt. The Doctor ditches Susan so she can get married to the dude she was hanging out with; he leaves Sarah Jane Smith in the wrong city because humans aren’t allowed on Gallifrey and he’s been summoned; Nyssa decides that she’d rather stay and help plague victims than keep traveling; and so on. Sometimes they decide to leave, sometimes the Doctor leaves them behind, but the show seldom dwells.

On the one hand, if you don’t like a companion this is fantastic. Classic Who relies much less on continuity (due, I think, largely to the format): if a character is gone, chances are we won’t hear about them again. But it does mean that some interesting character dynamics aren’t fully explored.

All told, I had a lot of fun with the classic era, and I think a lot of it is worth revisiting. Due to the episodic nature it’s pretty easy to just drop in wherever; you’ll probably figure out what’s going on without too much trouble. (I think Romana is the only companion who benefits from a bit of explanation, and even then all you need to say is “Romana is also a Time Lord.”)

The Davies Era. When I started watching, of course, Davies was all there was. I think I picked it up right after the End of Time had aired, before Moffat’s era started. Davies loves his character drama (see also my “rose is sad” tag), and lingers a lot on the effect the Doctor has on the lives he touches--and on the lives of their family and friends. Though this sometimes goes spectacularly badly (see: Father’s Day), for the most part I appreciate it. The companions feel more real, and it adds a layer of complexity to the Doctor’s character and his relationship with his companions.

He also likes big explosive finales where the fate of the world/universe is in balance, and meta-arcs which aren’t so much story arcs as they are a series of references that make you go “ah-ha” when you finally hit the finale. I actually like that, for the most part: if the finale is bad, you don’t feel that the whole arc is ruined; if it’s good, it adds a little bit of extra satisfaction to the resolution.

Early on in Davies’ run, the Doctor was usually an unknown character. He later starts running into people he’s encountered before, and of course the Daleks have a personal vendetta, but only once (during a Moffat-penned episode) during the Davies era does the Doctor save the day by just saying “I’m the Doctor, look me up.”

The Davies era is still firmly in the classic style: the Doctor and his companions live on the TARDIS. In the modern era they now visit their homes with some regularity, but they’re still primarily travelers. On some level, even if they’re expecting to be able to go home again, they give up their lives to travel with the Doctor.

The Moffat Era. I was actually pretty stoked to hear Moffat was the new showrunner when time rolled around, because his episodes thus far had all been top-notch. And while doing this rewatch I did not dislike it nearly as much as I’d remembered. So why was it frustrating my first time through?

I think most of it is that Moffat likes to set up interesting mysteries without having a good resolution in mind. Sometimes he simply fails to resolve them, sometimes the resolution is a cheap cop-out, and sometimes it’s just unsatisfying. And the seasons are now woven into the meta-plot to some degree or other, making it harder to extricate.

Moffat’s meta-plots are more involved than Davies’ were, which also means they’re less subtle. They will regularly feature brief segments, usually at the end of an episode, where the ongoing mystery happens: In Series 5, it would be a shot of a Crack in Time; in Series 8, we had Missy; etc., etc. I didn’t like most of these meta-plots, as you can probably see from the fact that I gave most of their conclusions relatively poor grades.

Moffat is also much more focused on the Doctor as a character, and especially early on it’s focused on the Doctor as the Most Important Being In The Universe. This leads to some really goofy situations (the Pandorica Opens), and there’s a lot more reliance on “I’m the Doctor, look me up” as a resolution to plot devices. (There’s also a lot more reliance on “time travel!!!” as a resolution, which Doctor Who actually usually tries to avoid, I think because it’s usually not as clever as Moffat thinks it is.) He tries to back away from this later on, but there are still some lingering traces. (He literally makes the Doctor the President of Earth. This is wrong on so many levels.)

It also seems Moffat does not particularly like two-part episodes. So, so many of these stories I’ve had the thought on initially watching them that “if this had a second part, it would have been great.” The pacing feels rushed. Worse, often when we do have two-parters, they frequently follow the “part one is a completely different story from part two” formula. This is fine occasionally, but often it makes it feel like, rather than resolving the cliffhanger from the previous episode, we’re just assuming that was resolved off camera and we’ve got a new, related story going on. 45-ish minutes is not a very long time to tell a good story; it’s doable, but many of the stories want us to care about characters we’ve hardly had time to get to know.

For some reason partway through Amy and Rory’s time on the TARDIS, Moffat decided that his companions now lived primarily at home, and the Doctor only stops by occasionally for Adventure Purposes. I don’t think this decision made anything better.

Still, though I have many critiques of the Moffat era, it’s still Doctor Who. It produced some fantastic episodes, and Twelve is probably my second favorite modern Doctor (despite a seriously rocky start).

Stray Thoughts. Doctor Who experiments. I think that’s at the heart of the show. Sometimes those experiments fall flat, and sometimes they accomplish great things, but despite being a show with a strong formula, it’s never afraid to innovate. It’s true we’d probably have missed out on some of the less enjoyable stories if the show had been more conservative, but we also wouldn’t have stories like Midnight. (Hell, we probably wouldn’t even be here. I don’t know if I would have made the decision to have the Doctor transform from a grumpy old man into a bumbling clown way back in the day, and I think that change, more than anything else, helped bring us to the modern era.) It’s a show with the spirit of an explorer, and even when it falls flat it doesn’t diminish the effort.

By the time this gets published, it’ll only be a few months til the Christmas special airs, which will be the end of the Moffat era and the end of Twelve, and very probably will be our first “official” glimpse at Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor. The show’s about to change--that’s what it does. That’s why it’s still here, fifty-odd years later. I, for one, am looking forward to it.

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Reviewing Modern Who: To His Coy Mistress

World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls. The Doctor decides to test Missy by having her pretend to be him, so he plops her, Bill, and Nardole down on a 400-mile-long space ship that’s hanging out by a black hole, so there’s time distortions so one end moves faster than the other. The ship’s sole survivor murders Bill straightaway because she’s human and humans draw the proto-Cybermen that live on the other end of the ship, so she gets taken down below and hangs out with John Simm’s Master, wearing a mask in the grand old tradition of “some creepy dude in a mask turns out to have been the Master the whole time.” He’s apparently the one who’s running the Cyberman project. Anyway, after taking a few moments to explain what’s going on here, the Doctor, Missy, and Nardole head down to the lower decks to find Bill. It’s been ten years down there, and now she’s a Cyberman.

Anyway, the Master reveals himself to Missy, they capture the Doctor, the Doctor reprograms the Cybermen’s definition of “human” so they now also try to convert Time Lords, and they all escape to a “solar farm” level, which for some reason is modeled after a beatific countryside. The Cybermen are in pursuit, the Masters decide to head back down below and escape in their TARDIS, the Doctor tries to convince them to stay and they’re like “nah I’m not into suicide missions” and scarper.

Long story short, someone needs to stay behind on this level and blow it up when the Cybermen arrive, and the Doctor decides it needs to be him, so he sends Nardole off to help evacuate the humans to the upper levels. Cyber-Bill has managed to retain her identity and hangs out with the Doctor for this nice dramatic explosive finale.

Then the Doctor dies, and then Bill dies, and then Heather, the water girl from the first episode of this season, materializes out of nowhere and tells Bill “you’re like me now” and also apparently Heather has the power to make Bill a normal human again. They take the dead Doctor back to the TARDIS then go off exploring the universe together. Then the Doctor comes back, and wanders out of the TARDIS and finds the First Doctor, just prior to his regeneration in that one episode where he spent the whole time unconscious in a room, way back when.

This is beautifully shot and acted, and while there’s plenty of bits I don’t like (while the Masters together are delightful, it seems like they forgot that the last time we saw John Simm’s master he was literally saving the Doctor’s life in a climactic redemptive moment, and I really, really wish Moffat would commit to an ending for his companions) they don’t really drag the whole thing down much. A-

And at the time of this writing, that’s it! I’ll be back for the pending Christmas Special (need to give Twelve a proper send-off, after all), and I may continue this along for the next season whenever it comes along (or maybe not), and I’ll probably write up some thoughts on the Davies and Moffat eras eventually. Until then I’ll probably forget Tumblr exists, but I hope I’ve provided some form of entertainment in the meanwhile.

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Reviewing Modern Who: Picting A Fight

The Eaters of Light. The Doctor, Bill, and Nardole land in Scotland in the second century in order to settle a bet on what happened to the famous Ninth Roman Legion, which disappeared in those parts. (The problem with the “Doctor stays put in Bristol and goes on adventures sometimes” frame is that the writers now feel like they need a reason for the Doctor to show up somewhere, instead of the traditional “this is just where they ended up.” It makes for a noticeably weak opening.) They end up splitting up, because apparently none of them watch this show, and, long story short, Bill ends up hanging with the handful of survivors from the Ninth while the Doctor and Nardole get kidnapped by Picts.

It turns out the Picts here have been guarding a portal into some hell dimension populated by light-devouring monsters, and when the Romans invaded, the gatekeeper decided to let it through in the hopes that (a) it would kill all the Romans and (b) the Romans would hurt it enough that she could kill it properly. Turns out, nope! Now it’s stalking the lands and murdering people on the regular.

Bill leads the Romans to the Picts’ hideout, conveniently enough, and the Doctor convinces them not to murder each other because sun-devouring monsters take priority. He figures out how the Pictish portal-guardians do their portal guardianing and sets up a plan and decides that he will just guard the portal for all eternity because he basically lives forever whereas humans don’t, but the humans decide they’d rather bravely sacrifice themselves instead. And to this day in Scotland you can hear their ghostly music by the cairn stones, etc etc. B+

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Reviewing Modern Who: Mars, By Jingo

Empress of Mars. The Doctor, Nardole, and Bill crash a NASA control center while they’re waiting for a signal from some new Mars lander called Valkyrie. It finds the text “GOD SAVE THE QUEEN” written in stone under the icecaps, so naturally the Doctor decides to go check it out. It turns out that back in Victorian times a bunch of Victorian-era British soldiers on Mars, hanging out with an Ice Warrior they’ve called Friday. Long story short, they think they’re digging for jewels but they’re actually digging for the Queen of the Ice Warriors, who wakes up and immediately gets attacked and decides to wipe out the humans, against the advice of Friday, and the Doctor. Anyway, there’s some drama, it turns out the Colonel was once hanged for desertion and the Captain has been blackmailing him ever since, the Captain mutinies and seizes command and gets his men wiped out, then when he’s got a knife to the Ice Queen’s throat the Colonel reappears and shoots him dead, then surrenders to the Ice Queen, who is moved by his concern for his companions and welcomes him into her service, and she lets all the humans live and the day is saved. Hurray! Oh yeah, early on the TARDIS inexplicably freaks out and goes back to Earth, and Nardole has to get Missy’s help to get it back. We never find out why that is.

This desperately needed to be a multi-part story. The plot hinges on the emotional arc between the Colonel and the Captain, but the Captain is only barely a character. Ditto the Ice Queen--her motivations are pivotal to the climax but we have no time to understand what any of them are. If this one had taken the time to give us the character development it so desperately needs it could have been fantastic. B

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Reviewing Modern Who: Attack of the Dystopian Zombie Monks

The Pyramid at the End of the World / The Lie of the Land. The sinister monks from last time are back, and they want humankind to consent to their governance, so they can save humanity from itself! They set all the clocks on the planet to a few minutes before midnight, and it’s ticking down pretty quickly. We’re meant to think it’s going to be World War III but actually it’s a science lab that accidentally made a bacteria that will destroy all life on earth and that also, for some reason, automatically vents all the contents of the double airlocked quarantined lab out into the atmosphere every thirty minutes. They’re super unclear on their terms of agreement, and if you don’t consent out of love (whatever the hell that means), you get killed and they don’t save the world. A few important people die off this way before the Doctor saves the day, but he’s blind and he can’t get out of the giant explosion he’s about to set up, so Bill, who the monks have decided has enough power to qualify, consents in exchange for getting the Doctor’s eyesight back, and she does so out of love, so they do it and he’s back and now the world’s a dystopian nightmare.

Cue a cut to six months later, they’re broadcasting some sort of mind control that makes everyone think they’ve always been here. The Doctor asks Missy in the vault for help, and she explains that the psychic link is through the person who consented (to wit, Bill), and if the link dies (or, preferably, becomes a still-living mindless husk), the monks’ power is broken. Naturally the Doctor tries to find another way, fails, then Bill decides to let it wipe out her brain, and it almost fails but then it turns out her memory of her mother means she can just overpower the monks’ mind control and free humanity, who rise up and cast off their shackles and overthrow their functionally omnipotent overlords. For some reason the entire second episode has Bill explaining the plot to the audience in the form of explaining it to her imaginary mother, who she talks to all the time.  C+

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Reviewing Modern Who: What If It’s Not Real, Man?

Extremis. The Doctor, lands in Bill’s house while she’s trying to have a date, and he brings the Pope and a bunch of Vatican officials with him to make sure to ruin things extra hard. They’re guarding some ancient untranslatable manuscript called Veritas, which I was really hoping was going to be some cool Voynich Manuscript type of thing, but it turns out it’s just an old document that says that we live in a computer simulation, and it uses a really poor understanding of computerized random number generators to create an at-home “shadow test” whereby you can prove you’re not real. (Pick a bunch of random numbers, then turn the page. All the numbers are there! In order and everything!) Everyone who learns this horrible truth commits suicide to escape the simulation, which would be way more compelling if “science nerd says we probably live in a computer simulation” wasn’t like 30% of Science Journalism headlines these days. In this particular instance, the simulations are created by a bunch of creepy looking monks who are planning to invade the earth and want to be sure they get it right.

This is interspersed with scenes of the Doctor going to some sort of Executions, Inc. planet and executing Missy (but it sets it up to make you think she’s going to execute him, for some reason? it’s not really that suspenseful and the twist isn’t that good? I think Moffat might just be congenitally incapable of not putting in pointless twists?), but he decides not to because River wrote some poetic words about them and sent Nardole after him to read them. Instead he’s keeping her prisoner for a thousand years, while trying to teach her how to Become Good. Turns out she’s the monster in the vault he’s guarding! Also when he refuses to kill her he scares the executioners off in the classic Moffat way, by having them Google him.

Anyway, in the end the simulated Doctor sends a message to the real Doctor, somehow, thus setting up the next couple episodes. C+

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Reviewing Modern Who: Attack of the Late Capitalism

Oxygen. The Doctor abandons his sworn oath to stay at the university and guard the vault and takes Bill and Nardole to a mining station somewhere out in space, where the corporation that owns the station charges people for the air they breathe. The miners also have space suits that are apparently capable of autonomous problem solving and movement, which makes one wonder why they aren’t just using robots--and since there’s no oxygen in the colony it makes one wonder why the Doctor and crew don’t just use the space suits in the TARDIS instead of expanding the oxygen shell.

The answer to both, of course, is plot! Unlicensed oxygen is automatically vented from the station, and the station’s suits recently received a signal to deactivate their organic components, or, put another way, kill the occupants. Naturally this means the Doctor, Bill, and Nardole need to put on the scary murdersuits, which are naturally malfunctioning, leading to a situation where the Doctor has to take his helmet off to give it to Bill, which leads to him going blind due to exposure to vacuum. They try to help out the station’s four survivors and figure out what happened.

Eventually the Doctor figures out that capitalism happened, and the corporate algorithm decides to terminate workers when they stop being productive, so the Doctor wires everyone’s life support to the reactor coolant, so if they get murdered the station blows up. Then the suits give everyone their oxygen so they can live longer and not cause the station to lose productivity. B

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Reviewing Modern Who: Hauswho

Knock Knock. Bill is looking for a house with five randos (or possibly four randos and a friend to be more precise), and a creepy old man materializes out of the woodwork (this will be extremely hilarious in a moment) and offers them a creepy old mansion for way too cheap. Naturally the house starts eating people straightaway, but fortunately the Doctor thought this whole thing was weird from the beginning so he’s around to help solve the mystery. Basically the wood is occupied by little cockroach-like insects and they’re eating people in order to sustain the life force of the creepy old man’s mother (who he says is his daughter in order to make it extra creepy), who is now basically made of wood. Fortunately the Doctor convinces mummy dearest that it’s time to stop unnaturally sustaining her life by murdering packs of coeds every twenty years, and she’s even nice enough to return Bill’s friends to their not-eaten states. Nice! B+

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Reviewing Modern Who: Ice Ice Monster

Thin Ice. The Doctor and Bill land in London, 1814, during the last great frost fair, where there are some mysterious green lights sucking people under the ice. It turns out there’s a giant fishmonster chained up under the ice, and some racist jerk is (a) deliberately feeding people to it and (b) harvesting its excrement and using it as some sort of amazingly valuable fuel source. His plans to blow up the frost fair and feed everyone to it fail due to some Doctorial interference, he dies horribly, and then the Doctor alters his will to hand his estate over to a gaggle of lovable street urchins. B

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Reviewing Modern Who: Planet of the Emojis

Smile. The Doctor and Bill land on a fresh new colony world staffed by Emojibots which kill people when they’re unhappy. The Doctor, figuring that the colony ship is probably on its way, tries to blow up the colony to save the colonists, but it turns out the colonists are already here, in sleeper pods, so instead he has to try to save them. Eventually he figures out that the colony microbots somehow evolved from providing basic food and water to making sure unhappiness was eradicated by killing all unhappy people, which seems like maybe the designers should have built a safeguard against. Anyway, the Doctor wipes the Emojibots’ memories and apparently gets rid of the “kill all unhappy people” subroutine and then declares them the indigenous species of this planet and negotiates a deal for the humans to live there. B-

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Reviewing Modern Who: Attack of the Spooky Water

The Pilot. The Doctor is now a university professor who gives lectures on whatever random subject he feels like rambling about and everyone loves him and he’s decided to adopt dinner lady Bill Potts as his private pupil. Also there’s a mysterious vault in the basement that he’s guarding, and also also Bill says he’s been there for fifty plus years.

Anyway, Bill has been flirting with a girl called Heather, who almost immediately gets possessed by an alien puddle and starts chasing Bill around campus, and then to Australia when the Doctor takes her there in the TARDIS, and then across time and space when the Doctor flees across time and space in the TARDIS, and then she kills some Daleks and is immune to their energy beams, blah blah. Eventually Bill figures out that this is happening because the last thing Heather did before getting transformed into a time traveling alien puddle is promise not to leave without her, so she’s just making sure to keep that promise. Heather lets Bill gaze into eternity for a moment before departing forever.

Then the Doctor decides not to wipe Bill’s memory and instead invites her along on some wacky adventures throughout time and space. B

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Reviewing Modern Who: Well That’s Just Super

The Return of Doctor Mysterio. The Doctor hands Grant, a kid comic book nerd in New York a gemstone and the kid swallows it, so he gains superpowers. Then, 24 years later, the Doctor and Nardole investigate a Sinister Science Corporation’s plot, and it turns out they’re brain-swapping aliens planning an invasion. Also he finds out that Grant is now a superhero called the Ghost, who works a day job as a nanny to the daughter of the woman he’s been in love with for eons of your years. Anyway, the Doctor finds out the plan is to blow up New York and then when all the leaders of the world run to Sinister Science Corporation asking for help, replacing their brains and thereby taking over the world. So the Doctor goes to their giant bomb spaceship and decides to ruin their plans by crashing it into New York and calling up the Ghost, who stops it in traditional superhero style. The day is saved! B

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Reviewing Modern Who: The Most River Song Episode Ever

The Husbands of River Song. The Doctor is hanging out on some planet or other when someone knocks on the TARDIS door and asks if he’s the surgeon. “Close enough,” he says, and it turns out River Song is married to some cartoonish space tyrant in giant cyborg battle armor and wants his head removed so she can extract the diamond that’s lodged inside it. He ends up just taking his head off and they stuff it in a bag and run off to a private cruise liner where you need to be a mass murderer to have a membership so she can sell the diamond. (It turns out River is a member! I guess she’s a mass murderer, but this is a funny episode so I guess it’s okay?)

Anyway, shockingly enough on a ship full of mass murderers, the sale goes badly, but fortunately River chose a time right before the ship gets hit with a meteor storm to make the sale, so they run to the bridge and try to stop the ship full of genocide hobbyists from crashing into the planet below. I’m not sure why they don’t just escape in the TARDIS, honestly, since that’s ultimately what they end up doing.

Once they’ve crashed, the Doctor convinces the dude there looking through the wreckage to make a restaurant on the spot, and then jumps forward in time until there’s a restaurant and he has a reservation and takes River on one last 24-year-long date.

If you can ignore the questions of “why does the Doctor have any sort of fondness for someone who cheerfully hobnobs with mass murderers and genocide hobbyists”, this is fun. B-

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Reviewing Modern Who: Gallifrey’s Anticlimactic Return

Hell Bent. The Doctor holes up in a barn on Gallifrey and refuses to talk to anyone until they send the President himself, and then he exiles said President and also the High Council and then uses an extraction machine to pull Clara out of her timeline just before the moment of her death. He’s telling the Time Lords it’s because she has information that would be helpful in their quest to learn about the Hybrid, a nebulous prophecy of doom, but really he just wants to save her life even though doing so is apparently a good way to destroy time itself. The whole episode keeps hammering that point home, with many compelling speeches and conversations about how saving Clara is dangerous and how the Doctor went too far in doing so and blah blah blah. His plan was to erase her memory and wander off, because I guess saving time from fracturing isn’t his speed, but she reverses the polarity of the memory wipe device and instead she erases his memory of her. Then she’s in a stolen TARDIS with Ashildr and seems like she’s about to go back to Gallifrey and let them put her back in her timestream so she can die properly and she talks herself out of it, and so they go flying off on adventures in a TARDIS shaped like an American diner, undermining the dominant theme of this entire episode.

Unless you consider “undermining itself” as the theme, I suppose. The return of Gallifrey is made into a coincidental “oh yeah it’s back now” anticlimax. It might not have been so bad to bring her back after her departure in Face the Raven, and it might not have even been so bad if she’d gone off adventuring in a diner with Ashildr instead of dying, but spending the whole episode focusing on how the Doctor bringing her back is a bad thing and dangerous for reality and then having her run off adventuring in a diner, combined with wasting what has to be one of the most anticipated events in modern Who on such an anticlimax, really spoils the whole thing. 

Also, the Hybrid arc is deeply uncompelling. C+

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Reviewing Modern Who: The Doctor Punches A Wall

Heaven Sent. The Doctor is teleported in a shifting puzzle castle in the middle of the ocean where the ocean floor is all skulls and there’s a spooky veiled monster covered in flies chasing after him all slow and steady like. Eventually he figures out that this is a bespoke hell designed to get him to confess, here defined as “tell a truth you’ve never told anyone before”, and it seems he’s figured out they want information about the Hybrid and he doesn’t want them to know it, so instead he starts punching the diamond wall that is the last gate before his exit and lets the creature kill him. Then he goes back to the teleportation chamber and has it recreate him, and goes through the whole game over and over again for billions of years, until he finally punches his way through the wall and winds up on Gallifrey. It turns out he was trapped in his confession dial the whole time.

This is a Solo Episode, where Peter Capaldi is basically alone and showing off how great he is for the entire episode, and it’s actually pretty fantastic despite the relative weakness of the storyline it’s attached to. A

[rcrantz]

Reviewing Modern Who: Put A Bird On It

Face the Raven. Rigsy, all the way from last season, gives Clara a call on the TARDIS because he got a mysterious tattoo he doesn’t remember, and it’s counting down. So the Doctor and Clara investigate and find out that Ashildr is the mayor of a refugee camp hidden in a London street, and that Rigsy was accused of a crime without evidence and sentenced to death by countdown tattoo, then had his memory wiped so he didn’t remember any of it. What a charming little place!

As the Doctor and Clara investigate it becomes obvious that this was a trap meant to lure the Doctor here, and also Clara finds out you can transfer the countdown tattoo to a willing subject, so she transfers it to herself because it probably sounded like a good idea in her head. It turns out the person who was allegedly murdered isn’t even dead, and Ashildr was going to remove it once the Doctor fell into the trap, but once the murder tattoo is transferred she can’t remove it, or something, so Clara’s going to be dead forever in a few minutes.

The Doctor threatens to bring hell down upon Ashildr but Clara’s like “cool your jets, waging a bloody path of revenge isn’t very nice” and the Doctor reluctantly agrees to try not to murder Ashildr six ways to Sunday. Then Clara dies and Ashildr hits the teleporter he has locked on his arm and teleports him into the next episode. B+