Tom Salinsky

Well, where to start with this one? Series 11 seemed to me to be characterised mainly by sluggish pacing, lots of walking, endless scenes of the baddies wanting nice chats with the Doctor instead of enacting their evil plans, and a general air of torpor. What was mildly refreshing was the insistence on having nothing from the Doctor’s past. Series 12 massively reversed course, giving us return appearances of the Master, the Cybermen, Captain Jack, and tying the continuity of the show into a five-dimensional-hyper-pretzel with alternate versions of the Doctor whose presence makes zero sense even once explained. And Floox doubled down on all of the above, only with a hefty dose of ADHD, just in case anyone was nodding off at the back. What was lacking throughout these stories was any meaningful character interactions. The over-full TARDIS crew generally just stood on the sidelines watching the adventure happen. Occasionally, guest characters would get something resembling an arc, but not often. There was a glimmer of something with a bit more depth and texture in Eve of the Daleks but not a single particle of that promise made it through to the incredibly poor Legend of the Sea Devils.

This one didn’t start well. We begin in the thick of the action with a ship of some kind under attack. Immediately, it’s all the usual problems. Action and visual whirr in place of story. Bland, functional dialogue. Hey look, Cybermen. ARE YOU HAPPY, FANS? The revelation that the “cargo” is a sweet little girl made me stop and take notice. Okay, I thought, the teaser might have been witless, leaden, epilepsy-inducing eye-candy, but that is a neat twist. I wonder who she is? I needn’t have bothered, we don’t ever find out. (Possibly she was some species of Timeless Child? I neither know nor care.) Dan is written out on the thinnest of pretexts. Why was he there at all? It’s a centenary special. Everyone is invited. Why is Yas written out at the end? What’s Graham doing in that volcano? Where’s Ryan? Well, do there always have to be reasons for things?

Chris Chibnall’s most divisive episode to date is almost certainly The Timeless Children. Among the many things this was criticised for were the fact that the Doctor spends much of the middle of the episode trapped in a limbo space talking to herself, the fact that the Master’s evil plan is to show her the PowerPoint Presentation of Doom, and the fact that a nice old man blows himself up so that she doesn’t have to sacrifice herself to wipe out the new generation of Cybermen. Well, in this episode, the Doctor spends much of the middle of the episode trapped in a limbo space talking to herself, the Master’s evil plan is to roll out the PR Campaign of Ultimate Evil, and in case you were worrying about that nice old man, turns out his death was completely pointless, because all those Cybermen he died to eliminate are absolutely fine.

Hey look, it’s Ace. ARE YOU HAPPY FANS?

Hey look, it’s Tegan. ARE YOU HAPPY FANS? ARE YOU??

DALEKS AND CYBERMEN IN THE SAME STORY. ARE YOU HAPPY FANS? SAY YOU’RE HAPPY. SAY IT.

Hey look, it’s Rasputin. For some reason.

ONLY JOKING. IT’S THE FUCKING MASTER. BE HAPPY. BE HAPPY FANS. EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED IN ONE EPISODE. BE HAPPY!!

IT’S DAVID BRADLEY AND PETER DAVISON AND COLIN BAKER AND SYLVESTER MCCOY AND PAUL MCGANN AND JO MARTIN AND BRADLEY WALSH AND ASHAD AND VINDER AND KATE STEWART AND THE CLOISTER BELL REMEMBER THE CLOISTER BELL AND BONNIE LANGFORD AND KATY MANNING AND WILLIAM RUSSELL AND NITRO NINE AND ACE SAYS WICKED. HAVE YOU CUM YET FANS. HAVE YOU?

I’m 50 years old. I remember all (well, most) of these faces from the first time around. Chris Chibnall is 52. He’s an old fan, writing for other old fans. Sadly for him, I hated it. What did the ten-year-olds make of it?

And apart from being a bad idea, this is also a colossal mess. Characters and villains and ideas come and go, like brightly coloured soup sloshing in and out of various tureens, but none of it goes anywhere or means anything. Ashad loses anything which made him interesting in any way and he’s now just another goon. Ace and Tegan stand around and comment from the sidelines, because that’s what companions do in this era of the show. The Master cos-plays as the Doctor, announces he’s going to trash the Doctor’s reputation (Way to raise the stakes! Trash her reputation! Tremble!) but never gets around to actually doing it. Lasers bounce off holograms, you know, the things that are famously insubstantial. There are missing paintings, but don’t worry about it, nothing comes of it. Vinder is here, for some reason. One Dalek betrays the rest. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s all part of the Master’s plan. Or maybe it isn’t. The Master needs an army of Daleks and Cybermen to stand around him while he whammies the Doctor because if they aren’t there, then, well, I dunno, but it wouldn’t look as COOL.

I was pretty frustrated at the way in which Flux, which went to great pains to remove the Doctor from the action, was resolved only by having multiple versions of the Doctor in different places, which felt like a massive cheat. Here again, the Doctor is comprehensively taken off the board, and then pops up again in multiple guises. The Peter/Janet and especially the Sylvester/Sophie scenes have a speck of something greater – this would love to be School Reunion with Lis and Ten, but it never comes close. The rest is just lights and noise and shouting. And the script not paying attention to itself. Thirteen comes back to life, Jo Martin fades away, announcing that the hologram AI has served its purpose. Until it suddenly pops up again in front of Tegan.

If you aren’t convinced that this was incompetently assembled by a writer whose MO is just to occupy characters with busywork because he’s only got enough plot for about twenty minutes, let’s look a bit more closely at what happens with Ace, Tegan and Kate. Kate summons Tegan and Ace and they all meet the Doctor. But they don’t go with her, so they don’t get a chance to influence the plot at all. They stay behind at UNIT and move upstairs when Cybermen invade a middle floor. Kate wants them to leave the building so Ace and Tegan go up to the roof. Tegan then decides she doesn’t want to leave, so she goes all the way back down again, returns to her original position with Kate, and they argue about this. Ace stays in place while many other scenes happen. Then she finally jumps off the roof with a parachute., something she could presumably have done from the middle floor if she’d opened a window. Cybermen shoot at her and damage the parachute, so now it’s the same as if she jumped off the roof without it. Yas (somehow!) foresees all this and positions the TARDIS underneath her, putting her back into the TARDIS which is where she needs to be – the same TARDIS she could have got into twenty minutes earlier.

Now Kate reveals that there is another way down to the basement and so Tegan – who has already gone up to the roof and back down again – now goes down to the basement, which is where she actually needs to be. Kate says “I’ll trade you my life for the lives of my troops,” does nothing to ensure the safety of her troops and just surrenders, and then Tegan makes it to the basement and does the thing with the thing. Ace (and Graham for some fucking reason) meanwhile has to destroy the Daleks with Nitro Nine so that when the Doctor freezes the volcanos from the TARDIS, they… she… it’s… no, I’ve no idea, sorry.

It’s all so convoluted, meaningless and messy. None of it clicks together, none of it reveals character, and much of it is blitheringly stupid: Tegan just letting go when Cybermen start shooting through the walls at her, and surviving just because. Kate and Tegan standing two feet in front of an enormous building which is being demolished behind them and not being crushed by tons of falling masonry. Fatal tissue compression that works in reverse. The Master dancing to pop music like he did in that other good episode that everybody liked. DID YOU LIKE IT WHEN YOU SAW IT AGAIN? DID YOU? DID YOU LIKE IT?

What I think is worth saying is that I was initally very struck by Sacha Dhawan’s Master and really felt like in Spyfall he put a very new spin on a very old character, even if the writing reverted him back to the John Simm version. But in later appearances, it got more and more tired, and what was once a tour-de-force performance became bland and predictable. Here, though, with no help from the script whatsoever, he works miracles. He’s unpredictable, sinister, operatic, charming, silly, savage, vulnerable and somehow knits all of that together into a consistent characterisation. The hosts of excellent podcast Flight Through Entirety have observed that in the classic series, the real threat that the Master poses is that he’ll be so charismatic and funny that he’ll steal the show from the Doctor. That idea is taken to its logical conclusion here, and while I won’t miss very much about this era, I do feel we were denied seeing this exceptional actor as the Doctor and he’s really the only reason this is worth watching at all.

Oh, and I did quite like “Tag, you’re it.” “Introducing David Tennant” I assume was Russell T Davies’s gag.