Revolution of the Daleks by Chris Chibnall

A main plot bolted together from a whole load of better Dalek stories, overshadowing what could have been a very effective departure for Ryan and Graham.

Doctor Who left us at the end of Series 12 with possibly the most controversial episode in its history. It made some sense therefore to go for a more traditional festive special to follow up with. The major problem with Revolution of the Daleks is that in this case traditional just means painfully unoriginal. There are a lot of ideas flying around, and the story does a decent job of keeping the pace up through its extended runtime, but they're pretty much all ideas that we've seen before. 

It's worth listing all the other stories that this plot borrows from just to reiterate the point that there is almost nothing new here. The idea that the Daleks are serving humanity is straight from Power of the Daleks and that had already been repackaged before in Victory of the Daleks. Daleks fighting each other based on the impurity of different factions is Remembrance of the Daleks material, and features pretty heavily in Big Finish's Blood of the Daleks as well. Throwing the Daleks into the void is of course what happens at the end of Doomsday. You get the idea. The Daleks occupy a difficult spot in Doctor Who history at this point: everyone loves to see them, but unless you've got a really decent original idea for them, it's probably best not to hang an entire story on their presence. The one new idea there is here, the episode does absolutely nothing with, namely the use of the Daleks as some kind of paramilitary police force. I know that this was all written and filmed in 2019, so there was no way to respond to recent events, but even with that, it feels like a massively missed opportunity.

So instead of driving show forward with new ideas, Chibnall instead chooses to spend a lot of time looking backwards. Revolution of the Daleks is absolutely drowning in nostalgia, specifically for the RTD era (a couple of nods to the Moffat era in the form of a Weeping Angel and a Silent are there too). Jack Harkness' presence is obviously the big one, and he's there to deliver a lot of 2005-10 continuity references, even repackaging a whole load of jokes from that era for one thing. His presence is pretty superfluous to the story, apart from to break the Doctor out of jail (heaven forbid she might have actually tried that for herself). We get no sense of where Jack as a character is at this point in his life and he disappears just as quickly as he arrived. I get that to a certain section of the fandom, an episode littered with RTD era references is going to go down pretty well, but it doesn't exactly suggest that this is a show with much confidence in its present that it has to constantly hark back to a different, more popular, time in its history. It desperately wants to be the RTD era, but ends up falling far short.

An ineffective Dalek story also drowns out a decent departure for the two companions the episode has to write out. All the ingredients are there for a very effective ending for Ryan. After ten months back on Earth, he's realised that he's more use where he is. But the episode is too distracted with other things to show us this, so it just tells us it instead. It's much more a theoretically satisfying payoff of Ryan's story, rather than one we actually get, and that's incredibly frustrating. The idea of a companion asserting their agency and choosing to leave the TARDIS is good, but the story hasn't bothered doing any of the work of convincing us that this is where Ryan has got to. It's a box ticking approach to writing and it doesn't work. In many ways, Graham's departure is more effective, even though he gets barely anything to do. He doesn't want to give up travelling, but will go against his own wishes to support Ryan. It's neat, tidy, and very Graham.

Despite all this, there are elements of this episode that work. Jack Robertson is a much better villain here than he was in Arachnids in the UK, especially as they toned down the tedious Trump comparisons for most of the runtime. Of all the characters, he gets the most to do in this. Yaz gets a good conversation with Jack, and it will be interesting to see if this is developed in the next season. I didn't find the political allegory, with the obvious Theresa May stand-in as Prime Minister, as cringingly awkward as it might have been. The political element of the episode is underdeveloped for sure, but at least it doesn't end with the Doctor suggesting that Nazi police drones are actually good or anything like that, which is something that hasn't always been guaranteed in the Chibnall era.

At the very least, Revolution of the Daleks sets up something of a reset for Series 13, with fewer companions and a chance to focus on the relationship between the Doctor and Yaz (the revelation that John Bishop's character will most likely be joining the TARDIS team notwithstanding). But I'm still left feeling uneasy. The reality is that there's not a single original idea in Revolution. The franchise feels desperately tired, just recycling past hits in the hope of recapturing the old magic. Series 13 has a hell of a job to breath some fresh life into the show. I'm not optimistic, but hope to be proved wrong.

• The John Bishop reveal at the end is done perfectly well. I'll withhold judgement on the wisdom of the casting choice until we've seen some of his episodes, but it does frustrate that the show doesn't have the confidence to go with an all-female regular cast.

• There is nothing interesting about the Doctor's scenes in prison. She mopes around for a bit and then is rescued. This era is so steadfastly refusing to give its female Doctor any agency and this is just another example of that. We don't see her even attempt to break out, and we're given the fallout of The Timeless Children as a pretty lame excuse for her inaction.

• While ultimately inoffensive, it's pretty obvious that the episode has nothing to say in its political allegory, other than that to create recognisable hate figures for the audience. Again, for an era that is so often criticised by idiots as being "too woke", it ends up being as small-c conservative as you can imagine.

• Having Ryan and Graham's final scene be almost exactly the same as their first seems like a mistake to me, particularly when we're supposed to believe that these are characters who have been profoundly changed by their experiences with the Doctor. It's just another box ticked, this time one that reads "symmetry."

Rating: 5/10

Hell Bent: a subversive masterpiece

First of all, let be me clear that Hell Bent is not perfect. There's at least 15 or 20 episodes of Doctor Who written by Steven Moffat that I would consider better than it. It makes a few odd creative choices: the Doctor joking around before shooting the General; the lack of Missy when her presence is heavily signposted; and the Monty Python-esque firing squad. But these quibbles pale in comparison to what this episode gets right. At its heart, Hell Bent plays by its own rules, refusing to do what is expected of it, and the end result is masterful.

Hell Bent understands what kind of stories are worth telling. Steven Moffat knows that attempting to write a Gallifreyan epic is ultimately a doomed endeavour. So he doesn't even try. The return of Gallifrey was only ever one big Macguffin. There is no mileage in trying to make compelling television out of the Doctor's backstory (just look at The Timeless Children and how that managed to turn 65 minutes of revelations about the Time Lords into a tensionless snoozefest). Instead, Hell Bent focuses squarely on what the heart of Doctor Who has always been about: the relationship between the Doctor and their companions. The citadel of Gallifrey is literally built on a ruin of continuity in the form of the old monsters that litter the cloisters. Gallifrey exists solely to demonstrate how far the Doctor will go to protect his friend. The life and safety of Clara Oswald is fundamentally more important than rudderless continuity references, and it is the former that Moffat correctly chooses to focus on.

The episode dismisses the idea that Clara should be punished for trying to be like the Doctor, or even more insidious: the notion that a human woman *cannot* be the Doctor. Instead it opts for a resolution that is altogether much more hopeful. Russell T Davies had a tendency to build his companions up to be like the Doctor, but then assert that that situation could not be allowed to stand. Both Rose and Donna suffer tragic endings from being too much like the Doctor. It looks for a while, following the end of Face The Raven that the same thing has happened to Clara. Moffat instead contends that Clara should be rewarded for trying to be like the Doctor, and so she gets her own TARDIS, her own companion, and all of the universe to explore in the time before her next and final heartbeat. It's a fundamentally fitting resolution for the character that has undergone so much over the last two and a half seasons.

The episode is also a fantastic deconstruction of the Doctor's character and his mistakes. The Doctor isn't just wrong in Hell Bent. He has to stand there and listen while all the women in his life (Clara, Me, Ohila, and even The General, fantastically regenerated in a wonderful screw you moment to anyone complaining about Time Lords changing gender and race) tell him that he is wrong. The Doctor thinks that what Clara wants is for him to break all the rules to preserve their friendship. He is fundamentally mistaken, as the scene in the Cloisters demonstrates. He breaks all his own rules and he does it because he fundamentally cannot let go, and instead it is for those other characters, one by one, to line up and tell him that he has to let go. It's character deconstruction of the finest kind. There is no villain here (Rassilon himself is a faded antique who is dispatched in the first fifteen minutes) except the Doctor's own failures. His understanding of those failures is the central resolution.

Moffat leads us down the road of thinking that Clara's story will end in the same way as Donna's, before firmly rejecting Donna's resolution. What the Doctor does to Donna in Journey's End is a profoundly unacceptable violation against her will. Clara point blank refuses to let the Doctor rob her of her agency because her past belongs to her. Here, the episode is openly mocking television and film tropes. The idea that a female character should suffer so that the Doctor can have something to be angry or mournful about is fundamentally rejected. To have the Doctor wreak terrible revenge on the Time Lords as some sort of catharsis for Clara's death would fall instantly into that trap. Instead, Clara and the Doctor make a pact as equals, recognising the unsustainability of their situation and deciding to do something about it together. Instead of a story about revenge fantasy, it is a story about acceptance and empowerment. So much of Hell Bent is substituting what we expect with something that is far, far better.

Many fans have complained at the ambiguous resolution to the Hybrid arc. My problem with most of that criticism is that it seems to rest on the assumption that this is not a deliberate choice. This isn't incompetence on Moffat's part, he knows exactly what he is doing with this story. Hell Bent fundamentally rejects the idea that concepts like the Hybrid are remotely notable or interesting, because "prophecies, they never tell you anything useful." What the Hybrid is matters not one bit to the narrative that is unfolding because the question doesn't matter and the answer would ultimately just be ticking a box of continuity with no real substantive meaning. The Doctor doesn't know what the Hybrid is, he's bluffing on empty, but he's worked out that the Time Lords care enough about discovering the truth that it will give him the chance he needs to save Clara. And that's all the Hybrid is good for. There's a degree to which Moffat is deliberately baiting the audience here, and I can understand why that leads to frustration, but I don't care.

I often compare the Capaldi era to The Last Jedi. I think now that, much like The Rise of Skywalker, the Chibnall era has come along and in the same vain attempted to recapture old glories while fundamentally misunderstanding what made those stories great in the first place, that comparison is even more valid. The problem with the Capaldi era, much like The Last Jedi's relationship with the rest of Star Wars, is that it is fundamentally better than the franchise it is built out of. Series 8, 9 and 10 are Doctor Who's most successful attempt to be a proper TV drama, as opposed to the fun and slightly ridiculous show it has been throughout most of its history. It is as much a deconstruction of the show as it is an era of the show itself. It grapples with themes and ideas that are incredibly rich and compelling, and generates a great deal of controversy for even attempting to do that. Hell Bent is the perfect distillation of that controversy. It is the most subversive episode of Doctor Who ever made. There are many people out there who dislike it intensely, and that is of course their right, but I can't help feeling that a lot of that hate comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the episode is trying to do. For me, it is part of a run of stories from Face The Raven to The Husbands of River Song that represents the pinnacle of Doctor Who storytelling and, for that, I can't help but think it's great.

The Woman Who Fell to Earth by Chris Chibnall

For me, still Chris Chibnall's best Doctor Who script so far.

There are two types of regeneration story in the revived series of Doctor Who. You've got the ones that deal with the blunt trauma of regeneration, relegating the Doctor as a side character for much of its narrative while their companions deal with the fall out and learn to cope with their friend suddenly looking like a different person. Think The Christmas Invasion or Deep Breath. Then there's this, which in terms of the Doctor, feels a lot like The Eleventh Hour. Although it doesn't open directly with the Doctor, when she appears about nine minutes in, she is thrust into the main action and remains there for pretty much the entire episode. It's a good creative choice and it gives us some early insight into this new version of the character: she's playful, inventive, and connects with the people around her in a very human way. As first impressions go, Jodie Whittaker gives a strong one.

Whittaker effortlessly slots into the role of the Doctor. She gets a number of great Doctor-ish moments, including building a sonic screwdriver out of Sheffield steel in a lovely montage, asking Yaz if she can have a go on the police car sirens, and her puzzled delight of having to find a set of women's clothes in a charity shop. She even gets the customary "I am the Doctor" speech, but it's a lot less grandiose than normal. "Sorting out fair play throughout the universe" might not be the most epic mission statement the show has ever delivered, but it's very portentous of where this character is going to go.

At the same time as presenting us with an entirely new Doctor, The Woman Who Fell to Earth gamely grapples with the challenge of introducing three companions. They all show potential here, which is something that will come back to bite the show when it frequently loses interest in them in later episodes. Chris Chibnall invests a great deal of energy in making them feel real. Yaz is underchallenged as a junior police officer, forced to work her way up. Graham is a cancer survivor. Ryan struggles with his disability and his distant father. These are tropes, for sure, but the reason tropes work so often is that we identify with them. Each of the three of them gets something useful to contribute to the plot and some nice moments. There's work to be done in making them feel like a cohesive unit, but not a bad introduction at all.

Despite its slight plot, the pacing of this episode is frenetic. It jumps from scene to scene, building a great deal of energy into the narrative, while knowing when to allow for smaller or more intimate moments. Like The Eleventh Hour before it, it is determined to make you pay attention. Unpredictably is inherently woven into any new era of Doctor Who, and this utilises that well. At any moment, there is some new mystery to solve, some development to investigate, that keeps everything moving along at breakneck speed. It is a bold gambit to draw in a casual audience that was perhaps watching the show for the first time in a while out of curiosity for the new Doctor and many will have found themselves being swept up in the action. I certainly was.

But, despite the fast-paced plotting, the story also knows where it needs to focus and avoids getting bogged down where it doesn't need to be. Tim Shaw himself is a nothing villain. The Stenza are an interesting concept but it's pretty easily brushed off by the episode understandably concentrating on other things. The relatively forgettable nature of the monster isn't a major problem here, as series openers are usually a lot more concerned about presenting us the new regulars. After all, it's hardly because Prisoner Zero is a villain for the ages that The Eleventh Hour is so good. Most of the problems with Tim Shaw will come later. Here he is good foil for the Doctor to establish her new personality and his face of teeth is genuinely quite unpleasant.

The major flaw with this episode is what it does with Grace. She didn't appear in the promotional material for the season so her card was marked from the beginning. Unfortunately, she also happens to be the most compelling of the four proto-companions: kind, brave, empathetic, and just a great deal of fun to be around. There's a whole load of literature about the problems associated with fridging a female character of colour in order to tell a story about a white man that I won't go into here, but it's a problem for the show that goes beyond the very welcome increased diversity in its casting. Don't get me wrong, I like Graham's character arc in this series (the finale aside), and his speech at her funeral is a very moving moment performed excellently by Bradley Walsh. But it's still a shame that we never see any more of the huge potential in Grace. I only hope Chibnall's decision to kill her off wasn't solely because it created a misdirecting pun for the episode title. I'm going to be charitable and assume that it wasn't.

What's more, this is quite a dour episode, and this isn't helped by the fact that it's almost entirely set at night. There's relatively few funny moments with "These legs definitely used to be longer!" a notable exception. With two seasons worth of hindsight now, it's clear that Chris Chibnall doesn't have the flair for dialogue that RTD or Moffat had. But, even given that, this feels like quite a serious piece, and it invokes the mood of Torchwood at various points. After ten seasons of fast-paced and funny dialogue, this is quite jarring at first. Doctor Who has always had a pretty uneasy relationship with humour, but its absence feels very noticeable here.

There is a huge amount to enjoy in the The Woman Who Fell to Earth. In what was an inherently risky moment for the show with a new showrunner and a new Doctor, particularly the first female Doctor, it delivers a solid episode that, whilst not spectacular, does the job it needs to reassuring the audience that this is still recognisably Doctor Who. A strong introduction for the new Doctor and her companions, who all show a great deal of promise here. In fact, one of my biggest frustrations with this era of the show is how little of the potential shown here is actually followed through later on. This is Chris Chibnall's best Doctor Who script to date. It exudes confidence and never once buckles under the pressure that is inherent with all new beginnings. It is forcefully unapologetic about injecting newfound diversity into its central cast and, an unfortunate creative choice in what happens to Grace notwithstanding, handles the responsibility that comes along with that very well. Series 11 gets off to a very good start.

Random musings

• I approve of the narrative beat at the end where all the regulars get unwittingly teleported off Earth. It's another invocation of very early Doctor Who when the Doctor's travelling companions weren't exactly willing adventurers. Or, to put it another way, the Doctor basically kidnaps them.

• 13 looks great in the ruins of Capaldi's costume. Dare I say it, I much prefer that look to the one she picks out at the end.

• The new score from Segun Akinola is good. It's much more subdued than Murray Gold's bombastic themes, and as much as I massively enjoyed Gold's work on the show, after ten seasons this feels like a welcome change of mood.

• Even while it's striving to carve out a new direction for the show, I find the callbacks to the past strangely reassuring. The orange glow of regeneration energy is still there. The Doctor saying, "Half an hour ago, I was a white-haired Scotsman." Yeah, it's still Doctor Who.

• Because I live in Sheffield, it's quite amusing spotting all the various landmarks of the city that crop up, including one scene that's filmed about five minutes walk from where I was living at the time this was broadcast. 

Verdict

8/10

The Timeless Children by Chris Chibnall

Brace yourself. This is going to hurt.

We'll start with the headline. The Timeless Children is bad. It's really bad. Let me be clear at the outset. I don't care about Doctor Who's internal continuity. It's been chopped up, messed around, and large swathes of it healthily ignored throughout most of the show's history. The problem with this episode is not that it represents the biggest shift in canon since The Deadly Assassin, the story that first introduced the regeneration limit and gave us what was up until yesterday the accepted history of the Time Lords. The key difference is that, in that episode, Robert Holmes wasn't setting out intentionally to fundamentally alter the history of the show. He was just coming up with narrative fixes to help the story he was trying to tell. The Master needs to have run out of regenerations, so let's introduce a regeneration limit. You get the idea. But with The Timeless Children, there is no story that goes alongside the continuity. The continuity is the story.

The big reveal itself, and it's worth pausing on this for a moment, is as follows. The Doctor is not in fact a native born Gallifreyan, but is instead an immortal(?) being from another world whose DNA is stolen by The Time Lords so they can gain her regenerative powers. It's total and unmitigated nonsense. It's the kind of bullshit that Big Finish couldn't come up with in their wildest dreams. The lore that the show is selling here is so bad as to be actively hilarious.

Not only is the content of the reveal total hokum, it's delivered in the most boring way imaginable, through an endless exposition dump that lasts roughly half the lifetime of the universe. It's just poor storytelling, and despite Sacha Dhawan's best efforts to make this information overload compelling, it isn't because we're just being told it without any reaction at all apart from the Doctor occasionally crying "no". There's no dramatic weight at all. I don't normally like to set about rewriting episodes (where we would you even start with this...) but why not have the Master trap the Doctor in the matrix where she has to discover the truth for herself? That might add some tension, or at least sense of agency, to what's going on here. But no, we get half a sodding hour of the Master going, "I'm telling you things. Big things. Important things."

But the very worst thing about this whole sorry affair is that, despite being billed as a finale with reveals that will change everything, and that "nothing will ever be the same again", what we get changes almost literally nothing. The Doctor is still the Doctor. We go through this whole continuing wrecking ball for no reason at all. We know that none of this matters because the Ruth!Doctor turns up and tells us as much, which is the closest this episode gets to being self-aware at any point. I find it very hard to believe that this will materially affect who the Doctor is going forward, or how she operates. She will still be, to coin a phrase, "an idiot, with a box and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out." If she isn't that, then what you're left with isn't Doctor Who anymore. Which begs the question: what the hell is the point of any of this?

Speaking of the Doctor, Chibnall era Who has reconstituted the character as an ineffectual bystander who does almost nothing in the face of death and atrocity. Here is an almost perfect example of that. The Doctor is so passive in this story as to be almost entirely inconsequential. The Master might as well have been spouting his revelations to a cardboard cutout of the Doctor. She stands around for almost the entire runtime while the Master explains her new Wikipedia entry to her. Jodie Whittaker deserves great credit for her performances over the last ten episodes, but the characterisation is so flimsy here, I barely even registered she was there.

What plot there is alongside this narrative farce is every bit as abysmal as what's going on inside the Matrix. I'd like to be able to say that the worst thing about the Cybermen is that they revert to being the mindless cannon fodder that they were in the 1980s and most NuWho finales up until now. But it's even worse than that, because the Master's dastardly evil plan involves upgrading Time Lord corpses into Cybermen to create a race of unkillable superbeings. It reads like bad fanfiction I know, but that's what happens. Suddenly the non-reveal of what the Hybrid was in Hell Bent looks like an absolutely genius move from Steven Moffat. 

But it's all fine because Ashad, now conveniently killed and miniaturised, and left just lying around on the floor of his spaceship, has a "death particle" (stop laughing at the back) stowed handily about his person. Even more helpful is that random old guy character turns up, exposits his entire backstory in about four and a half seconds, and sacrifices himself to save the day. That was lucky. The Doctor doesn't have to confront the moral dilemma the episode poses because she instead actively runs away from it. In trying to recreate the denouement of The Day of the Doctor, this ends up being its antithesis. Instead of deciding that there had to be another way and that the genocide they thought they committed in the Time War could never really be justified, the Doctor just lets someone else do the genocide thing for her. It's an ending so obvious and signposted, Chekhov's Gun may have just been replaced with Chekhov's Atomic Bomb.

This story is the Cartmel Masterplan on steroids. For those that don't know, the script editor of the final three seasons of Classic Who, Andrew Cartmel, had a plan to reintroduce the mystery of the show by making the character of the Seventh Doctor darker, more mysterious and manipulative. This was all building up to the big reveal that the Doctor was one of the founders of Time Lord society. Cancellation saved the Cartmell Masterplan because you got all of the interesting character work without any of the dumb reveal. This story is the dumb reveal without any of the character work and unsurprisingly it doesn't work in the slightest.

The Timeless Children is a dismal misfire in almost every conceivable way. Like being trapped on a 400 mile long spaceship reversing away from the gravitational pull of a black hole, time did funny things while I was watching this episode. It honestly felt like it lasted about three hours. It sprays great jets of continuity at the audience, with references that even I wasn't immediately able to place. Chris Chibnall has written an entire season of Doctor Who in order to canonise the Morbius Doctors. The fact that this was broadcast at primetime on BBC1 on a Sunday evening is legitimately hilarious. It's an expanded universe aficionado's idea of heaven. I've got a lot of time for the expanded universe material in the form of books, audio adventures and all the rest, but it should always kept firmly away from the main show. I pity any casual viewer watching this, wondering what the hell was going on and why they were supposed to care about any of it. 

I hope that this can be just one of those continuity defining moments that we can collectively move passed. Sadly I feel like that hope is misplaced. Whatever happens now, it feels almost inevitable that we are heading into a period of almost endless extended universe media about this new history of Gallifrey and the Doctor, let alone what future seasons of the TV show have planned. So much of what comes after is going to be defined by The Timeless Children and I feel exhausted just thinking about it. Is it bold and ambitious? For sure. Is ambition alone enough to make up for shockingly poor storytelling? No, of course it isn't. And so here I am, desperately hoping that nothing will come of this, because it would be rubbish if it did.

Random musings

• So, any redeeming features? As I say, I like the Ruth!Doctor's cameo, even if it only serves to highlight how absurd the whole thing is. Graham and Yaz get a nice scene together. If only they had interacted just a little over the past 21 episodes, I might have even been willing to buy it.

• Speaking of the companions, they are totally sidelined here. Again. It seems the show is not quite done with the fam yet, but we've got the measure of them. An enormous waste of potential. I'm all for constructive debate about the relative merits of companions, but is anyone out there arguing that Ryan is a more compelling character than say Bill? I'm not even sure how you would argue that.

• I tried to count how many narrative beats were stolen directly from other, better, Doctor Who episodes, but lost count. I got The Witch's Familiar, The Doctor Falls, The Day of the Doctor, The Parting of the Ways, The End of Time and, of course, the final few seconds of every David Tennant season finale. I'm sure there were others.

• The Doctor seems very angry through a lot of this that she's had her memory erased. So, we're back to saying mindwiping people is bad are we? Nobody tell Ada Lovelace.

• Series 12 has been an odd one. It felt at about the half way point that we might be starting to get somewhere, but it has pretty much fallen to pieces towards the end. For me, it's repeating many of the same mistakes as Series 11, but covering them up with continuity overload. It's a shame, but this finale has catapulted Series 12 right down to the bottom of my season rankings alongside its immediate predecessor.

Rating

2/10

Ascension of the Cybermen by Chris Chibnall

We may be stealing episode titles directly from RTD now, but Ascension of the Cybermen owes a lot more to 1980s Cybermen stories. Mainly in that it's not very good.

OK fine, I lured you in with a click-bait headline. There's actually a lot more to recommend this episode than I'm giving it credit for at the top of this article. Let's start with the obvious. It's better than last season's finale offering, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, in that it doesn't actively make me want to claw my own eyes out and never watch television again. It didn't horrifically drop the ball at any point and kept my attention throughout most of its 50 minute run-time, which is an achievement.

This is a difficult episode to review. So much will depend on what happens in the finale. However, I've always believed, particularly in Modern Who, that every episode should be able to stand on its own merits. So, here we are, reviewing the first half of an incomplete story. It's a surefire way for me to look silly in a few days time after the final episode airs and any speculation I engage in here turns out to be completely wrong. As it is, I've got a sneaking suspicion I know what direction The Timeless Children is going to go in, but to avoid potentially looking like a fool, I'm going to keep those musings to myself until next week when I can claim that, whatever happens, I was right.

The problem that Ascension of the Cybermen has is the same one that afflicts a lot of 'first-half' episodes. There's not enough material to sustain the story for 50 minutes. Much of what happens just feels like stalling until it can reach the cliffhanger. That strategy can work, particularly if the cliffhanger is a sufficiently jaw-dropping one (think The Stolen Earth or World Enough and Time). But here, it is all far too predictable. Companions being threatened by an army of Cybermen feels pretty pedestrian in a Cyberman story and, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, we get the return of the Master. It tries very hard to be big and epic, but it can't quite manage it. In some ways, it's a victim of its own marketing. If the promotion material for the episode hadn't been leaning so heavily on how 'game-changing' this was going to be, I might not have felt quite so underwhelmed by the cliffhanger that we actually got. There's only so many times you can promise to change the game.

The Cybermen themselves are used pretty effectively in this story. I'm fully aware that the visuals are doing a lot of the work here. Doctor Who has rarely looked better. Yes, the Cyber drones are a bit goofy, but they do lead to one of the best action sequences we have seen in the show. There's some striking visuals later in the episode as well. The bits of dead Cybermen floating through space. The Cyber army beginning to wake up and menacing the companions and their fellow travellers (don't ask me to remember any of the guest characters' names, that would imply they had any function in the story or discernible personalities). It's all beautifully choreographed and directed and maintains a level of excitement that is not always present in episodes written by Chris Chibnall. There may be a hollowness to the whole thing, but it is at least compelling.

In fact, I think the Cybermen would have worked better here without their leader. After an interesting first appearance, the follow-up with Ashad is distinctly underwhelming. His discussion over holographic projection with the Doctor is a particular lowlight. There's nothing remotely compelling about The Lone Cyberman's justifications; he's just another 'generic evil guy with delusions of grandeur' in very much the same mold as Tim Shaw. The Doctor's apparently profound revelation that Ashad is just doing it because he hates himself is about as cliched a villainous motivation as you could possibly imagine. I said in my review of The Haunting of Villa Diodati that I was hopeful that his almost religious zealotry for Cyber technology would be followed up in interesting ways. Suffice to say, it was not. It feels like Chibnall is reaching for some compelling themes here, but can't quite manage it. The Cybermen have historically been about the absolute subjugation of the individual beneath ranks and ranks of identical machine creatures. If you're going to break with that tradition and have a Cyberman with a distinct and definable personality, at least try to make it an interesting one.

There's a similar lack of follow-through in how the episode deals with the remaining humans. There's the beginning of some kind of subtext in describing them as refugees, fleeing a conflict that has ravaged their entire civilisation, unwanted pariahs because the Cybermen would always come after them. Unfortunately, despite being hinted at, it's never given any dramatic weight or narrative importance. And once again, we fail to properly deal with the consequences of the Doctor's actions. Her decisions in the previous story lead directly into the events of the story and may be lead to the resurrection of the Cyber empire. That feels like something that should face more scrutiny than a pretty unfunny joke about how there's never a good time to mention that your species has nearly been wiped out. The Doctor is allowed to just carry on as if nothing has happened. It genuinely felt earlier in the season like we were getting to the point where the companions might be in a position to challenge her extremely baffling morality, but in the hands of the showrunner, there is no such luck.

Surprisingly, I actually quite liked the subplot involving Brendan and his life in what I assume is 20th century Ireland. The whole narrative comes out of nowhere, and doesn't any point connect to the main plotline, but that's OK for the moment. As with a lot of other things, much will depend on what happens in the finale. It feels like a very Moffat-esque writing quirk, in that the story you expect is not quite the one that's being told, and it is all done with minimal screen time and very economical storytelling. It feels unpredictable in a good way. For the first half of the episode or so, I was convinced that we were getting an origin story for the Lone Cyberman and a whole section of the story dedicated just to that would have elicited little more than an eyeroll. But as it goes on, it's increasingly clear that that's not what's happening at all. Why is he seemingly unable to die? What is going on with his distinctively not aged father erasing his memories? There's still plenty of scope for the whole thing to fall apart, and if it's going in the direction I think it is, it may leave me feeling decidedly unimpressed. The storyline can't quite redeem the entire episode on its own, as it feels so much like a sideshow at this point, but colour me suitably intrigued to find out how it all fits together.

I haven't talked much about the performances of the regulars, but they're pretty much what we've come to expect. Jodie Whittaker continues to impress, and her more serious and snappy performance helps sell the tension in a way that the other characters don't really manage. I'm very much looking forward to finding out what she can do with a third series in the role. The "fam" are pretty functional here. While it's nice to see Graham and Yaz interacting at all, and more than holding their own among a ship full of Cybermen, it very much feels like we've gone as far as we can with these characters, at least as a unit. The mileage has run out and it's time for some new, or maybe even just fewer, companions. It's a shame because I enjoy all their performances, and two of them have been badly wasted in their roles, but it's time for a fresh approach I feel.

Ascension of the Cybermen is not terrible by any means. It flirts with some interesting ideas, but does so in a very half-hearted way. It seems to be operating under the assumption that a suitably grandiose army of Cybermen will be enough to deliver the kind of excitement we usually get from penultimate episodes. This is the slot that has been filled by The Sound of Drums, The Pandorica Opens and Heaven Sent and we've come to expect, rightly or wrongly, something bold and ambitious. But this episode is held back by its lack of ambition. I struggle to believe that the height of what Doctor Who can achieve in 2020 is a remake of Earthshock (and let's be honest the lack of Beryl Reid clearly having no idea what she's agreed to appear in means this was always going to be inferior). There's nothing inherently wrong with that as an idea, and it provides some effective moments and great visuals. It might have worked better as a mid-season episode, but as a build-up to a finale that has been billed as "nothing will ever be the same again", it can't help but feel underwhelming.

Random musings

• Yes, the transition from the first scene through the eye of the Cyber helmet to the opening credits is very cool.

• Sacha Dhawan seems more comfortable in the role of the Master in the few seconds he appears here than he did throughout all of Spyfall. This feels like a positive development. And he looks pretty damn hot in purple.

• I haven't even mentioned Ko Sharmus yet. I have a suspicion I know who he might be, but he feels very much like a 'let's talk about him next episode' character.

• The trailer for The Timeless Children was the most interesting 20 seconds of the episode let's be honest. I think it's pretty clear that the finale is either going to be great or quite shockingly terrible, and there's not much room for anything in between.

Rating

6/10

The Haunting of Villa Diodati by Maxine Alderton

Generally very good, but the morality of the Chibnall era is beginning to irritate me.

One of my biggest complaints of this era of Doctor Who is its incoherent morality. This is most obviously manifested in how it characterises the Doctor. From deciding that it's somehow fundamentally better to let the spiders in Arachnids in the UK suffocate to death rather than shooting them, to her lecturing Graham for wanting to kill Tim Shaw in The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos despite planting DNA bombs in him earlier in the season, the Doctor demonstrates an overly simplistic and pretty warped worldview. Time and time again, this Doctor has been shown to be a pacifist in the broadest and most literal interpretation of the word, but without any thought or reference to the situations unfolding around her. I'm not sure any of these moments are deliberately designed to make the Doctor look either hypocritical or, if I'm being uncharitable, just ridiculously naive, but that's the message that's communicated.

At the same time, the show's politics is pretty murky to say the least. Both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat clearly have left-leaning politics and that bled through into their themes. Remember when the Doctor basically ended capitalism in Oxygen? I'd be much more hard pressed to say for certain what position the politics in the Chibnall era comes from. Instead of actively fighting and destroying systems of oppression, the Doctor appears at best mildly disinterested and at worst actively complicit in these systems (hello, Kerblam!). The show's morality is fundamentally muddled.

This bring us to the major, but far from fatal, flaw of The Haunting of Villa Diodati. Its ending is total garbage. It poses a ridiculous moral dilemma, the premise of which has no business in Doctor Who. Long gone is the Doctor's quietly understated and character defining pronouncement from A Christmas Carol that "in 900 years of time and space, I've never met anyone who wasn't important." Instead, we are told that the Doctor has to sacrifice the future to the Cybermen because history cannot possibly survive without...Percy Shelley. And it frames its argument in precisely those terms. This is not the Doctor proclaiming that she refuses to view moral choices as a numbers game, and that she has to do the most good she can with whatever the situation is at that moment, but instead that she has to save Shelley because he is a person she deems fundamentally important. This is not the moral position we can or should expect from the Doctor. The trolley problem has always been an entirely fatuous thought experiment posing as a moral dilemma and here it's used to undermine the Doctor's character and doesn't make any sense at all. The reality is of course that Percy Shelley is a minor historical figure, certainly compared to his (sort of) wife, Mary Shelley, but the episode doesn't actually seem that interested in Mary. She's basically just there to be inspired to write Frankenstein because of the Cybermen, an idea Big Finish has done before and done much better.

But while the content of the resolution is bad, it does elicit a terrific performance from Jodie Whittaker. She finally breaks from the "flat team structure" that she has insisted on for the best part of two seasons and declares that sometimes these decisions are hers alone. It's the kind of material that was so badly missing from her characterisation in Series 11. But it's more than made up for here and Jodie Whittaker totally owns the moment. There's been so little conflict between this Doctor and her companions, it feels like this has been building for some time. If some or all of the companions leave at the end of the season, we may look back at this as the beginning of the characters moving apart.

I much prefer the first half of this story, before the appearance of the Lone Cyberman. I get that a lot of this material is just stalling until the (very expected) reveal of the returning monster, but it's atmospheric and effective storytelling nonetheless. It's packed full of horror tropes like the severed skeleton hand creeping across the floor that are deployed to maximum impact. There are nice moments of comedy to balance out the scares as well, including Graham's relief that he's been given some food while not twigging that he's talking to a couple of ghosts and Dr Polidori campily challenging Ryan to a duel for no particular reason. The perception filter that has altered the layout of the house in order to trap all of the characters inside is a great little conceit as well, and adds some effective additional layers on to the mystery.

The episode falters somewhat when the Cyberman appears and becomes a pretty standard sci-fi runaround. Its plan is basically weird technobabble; something about a shimmering ball of silver energy and the Doctor assuming the role of "The Guardian" means the Cybermen can now conquer the future of the human race. If you say so I suppose. The Cyberman itself gets some effective moments, including one particularly chilling scene where Mary tries to reach out with kindness, only for the moment to be snatched away when it's revealed the Cyberman murdered his own children when they attempted to join the resistance. It's all very nasty, which is exactly what the Cybermen should be like. But these are just a few stray moments in a plot that feels like it's run out of steam.

The Cyberman design itself is good but I wish it had leaned further into the body horror in the way that Death in Heaven did with Danny's conversion. Here it feels a lot more like a man wearing armour rather than having been partially cyber-converted. Maxine Alderton is playing with some interesting ideas in her portrayal of the Cyberman, namely that he is a zealot who wanted to be converted as opposed to being forced into it, either through coercion or in order to survive. This is a concept that the show hasn't really played with before and feels like it has some mileage. It would have been good to explore this idea a little further and I'm hopeful that the finale will do so.

Despite my reservations, there is a lot to recommend The Haunting of Villa Diodati. As a horror story, it works very well indeed. As a setup for the finale designed to build excitement, it also works well. As a Cyberman story, it's a bit more hit and miss, and I just cannot connect to the moral dilemma at the resolution because I fundamentally reject its premise. It's still one of the strongest episodes of the season, as much because its flaws are a lot more interesting than the ones we've seen in many previous stories, and it builds some decent momentum as we head into the final two episodes.

Random musings

• "Save the poet, save the universe." Heroes references in Doctor Who. Just no.

• "I won't lose anyone else to that!" proclaims the Doctor, immediately evoking memories of Bill Potts. A reference to the Capaldi era? Don't do yourself an injury Chibnall.

• If the series finale tries to retroactively make out that Yaz has been in love with the Doctor (or even worse, The Master) this whole time, I will flipping lose my shit.

• Despite my cautious excitement, I'm getting such The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos vibes from the finale trailers, I think I might need to go and lie down.

Rating

8/10

Can You Hear Me? by Charlene James & Chris Chibnall

We're hybridising 2020 television themes with the Virgin New Adventures. It's odd.

An ancient God trapped since before the dawn of time. An enigmatic old man who feeds on people's nightmares. References to the Eternals, the Guardians, and the Toymaker. Enough dour expressions and angst to make even the cheeriest of us question our place in the universe. In many ways, Can You Hear Me? wouldn't have felt out of place in the 1990s series of Doctor Who books that continued the adventures of the Seventh Doctor from the point that the classic show ended but took it in a radical new and more (cough) adult direction. If you want to know what one of those books would look like in television form then this is probably about as close as you're going to get (apart from the more obvious example of the direct adaptation of Paul Cornell's Human Nature of course).

But this being Doctor Who in 2020, we also need a modern theme. The show has tackled mental health before, most notably in Vincent and the Doctor, but this is a much more direct confrontation of the issue, and it does this by framing it in terms of our regular characters. I'm not convinced it has anything particularly revelatory to say about the issue, but the message is simple: if you find yourself in need, then ask for help. It's not a bad message for Doctor Who to be conveying, and scrolling the internet after the episode aired, it's clear that it connected with quite a few people. That's no bad thing, even if I'm disappointed that a show with such limitless potential couldn't find a new and interesting perspective on this most important of topics.

In doing this, we finally finally get some kind of backstory for Yaz. It smacks faintly of desperation on the part of the writers, as if they've just noticed that the character is leaving in three weeks time and we still barely know a single thing about her. But, hey, I'll take it. The revelation that Yaz disappeared a number of years ago and (unspoken but implied) was on the verge of taking her own life because she was being bullied at school is powerful and hard-hitting stuff. The problem is that it's terribly underdeveloped. We never see the bullying. We've never had the suggestion before that it's made a lasting impression on Yaz, and the idea that she has an anniversary dinner with her sister every year to mark her disappearance is just plain weird. There's a really great idea underneath all this, and those few scenes at the end give Mandip Gill the chance to shine in a way she hasn't had the opportunity to do before, but it needed so much more work. It's the kind of concept that deserves an entire episode devoted to it, not just an afterthought because there's so much else going on. If anything, it makes me even more frustrated that so much potential in the character has been wasted.

But Yaz isn't the only character who goes through the mill this episode. We also get a glimpse of the other character's fears and nightmares as well. For the Doctor and Ryan, this is just a fleeting moment, in the Doctor's case connected to the season arc of the Timeless Child. But for Graham, it's a much more substantial and emotionally effective scene. I empathise enormously with Graham's fear that his cancer might return and the fact that the news is delivered by Grace, seen for the first time since Series 11, makes it a particularly devastating blow. Sharon D Clarke does a typically excellent job in the few moments that she is on screen, and it's a good reminder of why Graham's journey was by far the most emotionally satisfying part of last season. Grace, how we miss you.

Oh yes, and there's some kind of story about evil God-like beings who detach their fingers and use them to steal people's nightmare energy. There's actually quite a lot to like about this storyline. The visuals are suitably nightmarish, and Ian Gelder gives a great performance as Zellin. The detachable fingers are a bit of a gimmick but it makes for a pretty unsettling effect. The problem is that it's all very, and here's that word again, underdeveloped. The villains are only framed in terms of what they're not and we never really get a satisfactory explanation of who they are. The resolution is all too simple as well. The Doctor just blurts some technobabble, waves the sonic screwdriver, and suddenly they're trapped in their prison again. It's unimaginative and all very unsastisfying.

But there's also one thing about the episode I find pretty unforgivable and that's the scene that caused so much controversy after it aired. Graham admits to the Doctor his fears of his cancer returning and she...says she's socially awkward and gives him the brush off. Look, I get it. The Doctor is an alien and conversations about mental health can be difficult. But the Doctor is also a character that has an almost infinite capacity for empathy and compassion. For her seemingly not to understand how Graham is feeling is just wrong. Whether that was the intention or not is pretty irrelevant, as that's the message that is conveyed. The scene is clearly supposed to be played for laughs but it's painfully unfunny. It's perhaps an unfair comparison as his was the most mature interpretation of the character, but I keep wondering how Peter Capaldi's Doctor would have handled that conversation, and the Thirteenth Doctor doesn't come out of that thought looking very good.

Ultimately, this is an episode with a number of good, but half-baked, ideas. You can write a story about 14th century Middle Eastern attitudes towards mental health set in Aleppo, or about Gods that feed on nightmares and trick the Doctor into freeing them from their eternal prison, or about the troubled past of one of the companions. Trying to do all three is just too ambitious and it ends with a story that is all over the place. It's not the worst episode of the Chibnall era (far from it) because it's actually trying to do something interesting. But in trying to do too much, it ends up being a noble failure.

Random musings

• I complained about the overuse of globetrotting in the previous episode and it's even worse here. There's literally no reason for any of this to be set in 14th century Aleppo and it does a disservice to the setting, which would make a great location for a whole story, that it is so wasted. The same goes for the character of Tahira, who ends up as little more than window dressing while the episode focuses on other people.

• Ryan's greatest fear is Orphan 55. And so say all of us.

• The animation scene feels pretty out of place to be honest. It's cool that the show is trying something new, but it doesn't really work for me.

• The early part of this episode feels like a good opportunity to explore how this Doctor behaves when the "fam" aren't around. Turns out it's exactly the same as when they are.

Verdict

I can't fault the ambition of this episode. It tries a number of new ideas (and even new storytelling devices through its use of animation) but so many of them are underdeveloped that the story as a whole fails to land. It tackles an important theme but fails to bring a new perspective to it. On the whole, a missed opportunity.

Rating

5/10