Tom Salinsky

Well, that was unexpected!

The first forty-odd minutes of this, I unequivocally loved. The creepy opening with Neil Patrick Harris, born to play the Toymaker, connecting the sixtieth anniversary of the show to the birth of television itself via a spooky-ass puppet doll. The glimpses of the same Toymaker pirouetting as Camden (and we learn, the world) disintegrates under the weight of endless what-about-ism. UNIT’s Avengers-style HQ featuring the return of Melanie Bush. The (no doubt shortly to be revealed as evil) Zovirax or whatever the hell making little blinking upper arm doo-dads to keep everybody sane. A quick flash of a very much not-sane Lethbridge Stewart. The chase through the cave of traps, with Donna beating a puppet to death, because fuck that puppet, that’s why. And most gloriously of all, the Toymaker’s “Spicy” re-entry into the story.

And RTD’s commitment to this-is-all-one-big-story continues with shout outs to Mavic Chen, Sarah Jane Smith and more besides, and the Toymaker recapping the non-RTD years and totting up the fatalities (which did feel a bit like the returning showrunner marking the homework of the last two showrunners). Well that’s all right then!

Lasering the Tennant Doctor through the tummy is certainly an arresting way of bringing about a regeneration, but a lot of what followed really didn’t make a whole lot of sense and – if you’ll pardon the expression – I could feel the writer’s hands pulling the strings to make the story work. There’s nothing here I’m fundamentally opposed to. I’m not here celebrating MY RIGHT TO BE RIGHT ABOUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WRITE. Sure, let the Doctor split in two if he wants. Sure, let the old Doctor retire and eat curry in a garden if he wants. Sure, let’s despatch the most powerful villain we’ve ever seen with a game of catch – bathos is kind of the point. But are these all necessarily changes for the better? Would something less daring, more predictable, more running on rails actually have been more satisfying? I dunno. Maybe.

Is the Toymaker’s presence connected with the double Doctoring? Not clear. Russell’s stated reason for this bi-generation is that he was fed up of regenerations being tragedies, being sacrifices. But if victories are too easily-won, they cost nothing. And it was odd that the Toymaker’s plan to face a different Doctor having backfired, the fact that it was two against one in the game of catch at the end didn’t seem to factor in. The Toymaker just fumbled his last catch because he did. And if we are to believe that Ten/Fourteen’s Lonely God has finally tired of all the running, shouldn’t that have been layered in just a little more?

But my biggest problem with all of this is that, having decided to strip out the pain of losing a Doctor, having decided to have the Toymaker easily defeated, having decided to let the retiring Doctor have his TARDIS and eat his curry too, there isn’t a lot to be invested in at the end of the story. The climax comes at the 47-minute mark. The rest is just calm, pleasant, measured story admin. Still at least the angry fans who know what an anniversary special looks like and want only that got the multi-Doctor narrative they had been furiously clamouring for.

Reading that back, it all sounds rather harsh, and actually that wasn’t my experience of watching this at all. Those first 46 minutes are staggeringly good, with “Spice Up Your Life” possibly being my favourite sequence since the Osgood Boxes. And the remaining 15 minutes aren’t bad exactly, they’re just odd, and oddly dramatically inert. But you can’t say that about Ncuti Gatwa’s first few minutes on-screen. He blazes onto the set, full of fire and energy and gusto. Not for him a whole episode wandering around the TARDIS impersonating his predecessors, or sleeping through an invasion in his dressing gown, or going bonkers and strangling passing American botany students. The new Doctor arrives fully formed, and oh honey, I can’t wait for Christmas.