The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone

Chapter The 146th, which is a cracking story, with a great big crack in it.

Plot:

The Doctor and Amy, after receiving a ridiculous and over-complicated message from River Song, save the archaeologist as she escapes from a doomed spacecraft, the Byzantium.  The ship crashes on the planet Alfava Metraxis and a Weeping Angel escapes into catacombs of that planet - the so called maze of the dead. A group of religious soldiers arrive lead by Father Octavian, who River Song is working with on day release from the Stormcage prison in order to earn herself a pardon for killing a good man (Who could that possibly be?). They all venture into the maze to track down the angel, but realise the statues all around them are not in fact statues at all, but hundreds and hundreds of nearly dead angels. The radiation from the crashed ship is bringing them to life, the crash having been engineered to bring this about. The party start to get picked off, one by one. Finally surrounded, they are saved by the Doctor, who does something very clever with some gravity-related equipment, allowing them to float back up to the crashed ship, and climb inside. Here is a greater source of energy that the angels are seeking to feed off, and the Doctor soon discovers what it is - a crack, like the one in Amy's bedroom wall when he first met her, a crack in space-time itself, bleeding out energy. The Doctor examines the crack and discovers it was created on the 26th June 2010 - Amy's time. To escape the ever stronger angels, they escape into an onboard forest (used as an oxygen factory).

After an earlier altercation with some video footage of an angel ("That which holds the image of an angel becomes itself an angel") Amy is being taken over by an angel inside her mind. To stop it, she must close her eyes completely. The Doctor, River and Octavian leave her stuck in the forest with the remaining cleric soldiers as guards, and make for the spaceship's control room. The encroaching angels suddenly run off, scared of the glowing crack which has appeared in the forest. One by one, each of the soldier guards go to investigate the crack, and disappear, with those remaining, except Amy, unaware that their colleagues had ever existed. The crack is devouring things, and wiping them out of existence. Octavian gets caught by an angel, but just before he dies tells the Doctor not to trust River. With all the soldiers gone, and the wave of time energy from the crack advancing, Amy has to escape through a group of angels with her eyes closed; luckily, River manages to fix the teleport and bring her to the control room. The angels advance on them, but the Doctor does something else very clever with gravity-related equipment, and the angels all fall into the crack. the ingestion of such a complicated space-time event as the angels causes the crack to close. The Doctor says goodbye to River, who tells him they'll meet again when the Pandorica opens. Back at Amy's home, she reveals that she's been running away from her wedding the next day; the Doctor realises that Amy's wedding day is the 26th June 2010.

Context:

Watched the episodes from the Blu-ray, one episode per week as it was originally broadcast. For the first episode, I was joined by all the kids (boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7), who all liked it enough to come back a week later. This time they were also joined by the Better Half (woman, perpetually 21). The youngest was very excited that it was a Matt Smith episode, as she thinks of him as her Doctor, despite the fact that he bowed out before she was even old enough to watch the show. It's great that she's formed an attachment, just a shame that it couldn't be for the first female Doctor (who up until recently she would shy away from, but that situation is improving - she's watched all the episodes of the latest series live so far). She was also very impressed by River Song, saying "I like her" often during flashy shenanigans in the first episode.

First time round:

Having only two very young children in 2010, the Better Half and I were still watching Doctor Who just as a couple, generally live as it was broadcast on BBC1 or slightly time-shifted if we needed to put the kids to bed during the transmission slot. It was an exciting new phase of the show, but by the time of this fourth episode I was already hoping for a return to form. The Eleventh Hour had been good, The Beast Below a bit ho-hum. But - with the caveat that I have not yet watched it for the blog, so may reappraise when that happens - Victory of the Daleks was crushingly disappointing, squandering all its promising set-up on a wonky story to launch a Dalek re-design that was truly frightful. I'd seen parts of the Angels 2-parter in the trailer aired before the series started, particularly the big speech at the end of The Time of Angels "There's one thing you never, ever, put in a trap - me", and so had a feeling that it was going to restore my faith. It came to pass that the episode did indeed deliver the goods, and I was thoroughly enjoying myself by the time the end of the episode and that speech came around. Just as it was getting very rousing, a yellow banner appeared on the screen, with a dancing animated Graham Norton, plugging the next show to air. Before. Matt. Smith. Had. Finished. Speaking. It completely ruined the moment, and slightly soured the experience of the whole episode. Fearful that this was going to be the norm from then on, I was one of the approximately 5000 people to complain, and thankfully the Beeb stopped the practice.

Reaction:

2010's new lead writer and exec Steven Moffat appears to play things safe with his first set of episodes. Taking over from Russell T. Davies at the height of popularity, he reuses the basic structure that Davies set up for his seasons. There are three relatively lightweight stories to kick off, one contemporary invasion story, one set in the future, one in the past. There's a running reference in every episode that allows the audience to play a 'Where's Wally / Waldo?' type game. Davies smuggled in references to Bad Wolf, Torchwood or Harold Saxon, Moffat has the mysterious crack following our heroes around the universe, which cameoed in each of those first three episodes. Then - again following the Davies pattern - there's this big two-parter with a returning monster. As Davies did it, there would then be further single part stories and another 2-parter, before everything was rounded off in a two-part finale, but nothing more than the odd mention of the series' mysterious theme would appear in any of them. This is where Moffat breaks away from tradition and wrongfoots the long-term audience. They would undoubtedly have been expecting many more stand-alone stories, with a crack appearing now and then just out of view of the Doctor and Amy, right up until the end of the season, when suddenly the mystery would be revealed. But, not long into the second episode of this 2-parter, the crack is suddenly there, front and centre of the story - it's almost as if the finale has come in episodes 4 and 5, making it very exciting to see what can possibly happen next.

The trouble with the overarching plot becoming the focus rather than telling stand-alone stories is that each individual story is less satisfying on its own merits. Moffat loves intricate plotting - and to be fair to him, a lot of the audience does seem to respond to his puzzle-box narratives - but the law of diminishing returns is inevitably going to come into play. In The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone, we don't really find out anything about the mysteries of River Song or what caused these cracks in time, we just get a tiny bit more information. The overall story suffers a bit by having to cram in this stuff - the angels are relegated to a secondary threat in the Flesh and Stone episode, as they run away from the big bad crack. What you're left with ultimately is set pieces and exposition. But such set pieces and such exposition! There's something wonderful, something that never gets old, about scenes of Weeping Angels advancing in stuttering freeze frames as the lights blink on and off. There are also a couple of sequences that are the best of any in this period of the show, and perhaps of all time: Amy watching a repeating video clip of an angel gradually change, and emerge from the screen to become corporeal; plus, the long tense walk, where Amy has her eyes closed and has to stumble through a group of angels, pretending that she can see (which culminates in the magic, creepy moment where we see an angel moving in real time).

On the exposition side, there is some clever and fun use of the crack to clean up past continuity problems and justify rebooting things: the Cyber-King from The Next Doctor can tower all over Victorian London and stomp on buildings but not be recorded in any history books because a crack ate it. The crack has eaten the Daleks that stole the Earth, which means Amy doesn't have to remember that, and be laden down with all that baggage. Does this hang together, though? The crack in Amy's bedroom wasn't spilling out dangerous time energy like the one here: Amy slept next to it for years, and Prisoner Zero was able to walk through from the other side, and neither of them got wiped from existence. Why the difference? It also is hinted that Amy's crack has eaten the ducks from the Leadworth duck pond, and in later stories it is confirmed that it's wiped out Amy's Mum and Dad. Why is that crack able to discriminate and erase things that are not in physical proximity, when the one on board the Byzantium behaves so differently? Fixing one continuity issue has simply created another inconsistency. It seems churlish, though, to criticise a minor issue with Moffat's plotting, when he's putting such serious hard work into making his season (seasons!) fully integrated. Flesh and Stone, for example, contains a scene with the Doctor talking to Amy in the forest that's not really from this episode at all - it's the Doctor from the future, dropping into his own past story. Eagle-eyed viewers will have spotted that he is wearing a jacket, after just having lost his in the Weeping Angels narrative.

More intricate plotting, and seeding of ideas that will pay off later, is seen in the character of River Song. Did Moffat plan to make her a recurring character when he included her in Silence in the Library? Did he even know he was going to be taking over as lead writer at that point? i can't remember the order of events. Whether it was planned or just capitalised on later, it is magnificently seamless. In that first appearance, River asks the Doctor whether they have had "the crash of the Byzantium" yet, and now we get to see it in all it's glory. Here we find out that River can pilot the TARDIS after having "lessons from the very best", and that will then pay off in a year or so. The whole River arc hangs together very well for something written and produced piecemeal over 7 years or so. More than just a big bag of continuity references, though, River is an amazing presence: kick-ass, twinkly, sly, and deploying hallucinogenic lipstick to good effect (the lipstick is introduced for the first time here, with a trippy scene featuring Mike Skinner in a cameo as a guard).  Matt Smith more than matches Alex Kingston, getting some great dialogue and grandstanding moments to show off his new Doctor chops (this was the first story filmed, and he is confident and sure-footed from the off). Iain Glen as Father Octavian gives a solid performance too - his pre-death scene, where he is caught by an angel, and as soon as the Doctor looks away he'll have had it, is particularly good: "I wish I'd known you better", "I think, sir, you know me at my best."

It's all good, it's just a bit thin. There's an attempt at having a dramatic dilemma - should the Doctor sacrifice himself to close the crack, or should the angels? But the answer to that question is fairly obvious if one thinks about it for a second. Once the angels are dispatched all is well, and if the story ended there it would be fine. The story would no doubt be overrated by a lot of fanboys, but it would be very enjoyable for all nonetheless. But the final moments are a very awkward misstep. There's no delicate way to say it: Amy tries to jump the Doctor. It's not necessarily misjudged per se - anyone who's seen Fleabag knows a female character can be believably vulnerable and sexually assertive at the same time, but it has to be written and performed by someone as talented as Phoebe Wally-Whatsit; this was written by a middle-aged man,and performed by Karen Gillan, who is not up to the job of salvaging an un-actable scenario. She has a very good quality of being beautiful but sexually non-threatening, which has served her well in Hollywood, but makes her performance in this scene seem false. Matt Smith, meanwhile, although young and handsome enough, plays the Doctor as a child trapped in an old man trapped in a younger man. It's not a sexually charismatic performance at all, and so also does not work in that moment. Result: cringe.

Connectivity: 

Both Spyfall and The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone are big two-part stories with the return of an old adversary, and both have major revelations linked into ongoing plot arcs (or at least I assume that's the case for Spyfall, they might never mention the Timeless Child again for all I know, but I doubt it).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Counterfactual Extrapolation. At some point during the conception of the 2010 storylines, Steven Moffat made a serious entreaty to David Tennant about staying on as the Doctor for the new series 5, and Tennant reported later that he was very tempted. It's interesting to muse on what might have been had he agreed. The grandstanding moments of The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone would have been well within Tennant's wheelhouse - it's how Moffat tended to write the Tennant Doctor, particularly in the aforementioned library story. We also know from there that the chemistry between him and Alex Kingston would have worked. The scene with Amy coming on to the Doctor in her bedroom at the end would have been better with Tennant too; unlike Matt Smith, Tennant plays the Doctor with a certain amount of sexuality, and one can better imagine someone being attracted to his Doctor than the asexual persona of Smith - this isn't so surprising given that Tennant is playing the Doctor as Russell T Davies was writing him, as a remixed version of Casanova (which they had both collaborated on just prior to Tennant taking over as the titular Time Lord). In the rest of the 2010 series, most moments would likely have been much the same. The very first scenes between the Doctor and young Amelia Pond would likely not have worked as well - Matt Smith is particularly good working with kids - and the finale would likely have seen the Doctor dying and regenerating as part of his courageous rebooting of the universe with Big Bang 2, as I don't suppose Tennant would have wanted to stay on for yet another year. That would have been pretty cool.

It's just one of the curious roads not travelled, the almost-weres, of Doctor Who's long history. Other examples occur to me, having been linked to stories recently covered for the blog. What if Clara had been written out in Last Christmas? Would the 2015 series have been lifted by the presecne of a new companion? i can't see how it could not, to be honest. It might have made a difference to the stories told, too. Introducing a new character would have almost certainly have meant more single-part stories, so they could experience different types of adventures and different facets of their character could be revealed. Lots of 2-part stories, as we eventually got, wouldn't have fit. With a new companion, there wouldn't have been such a focus on the Lady Me character either, for fear of overshadowing the newbie co-lead. It definitely sounds better to me. Alas, a new character would almost certainly not have been killed off two episodes before the end, which means no Heaven Sent. That would be a shame. Elsewhere, I've seen rumours - not sure it's ever been officially corroborated - that The Doctor Falls was intended to be Peter Capaldi's last ever episode, but because Chris Chibnall didn't want his new Doctor's first full episode to be at Christmas, Steven Moffat and Capaldi stayed on to do Twice Upon a Time. This certainly fits the stories as presented: The Doctor Falls is a fitting send-off, a big explosive finale tying up the themes of the season, and finishing the Missy arc that's run throughout Capaldi's tenure; Twice Upon a Time is just treading water. I'd be very happy if it had happened as (allegedly) originally planned.

Almost always, more than one actor is in contention for the role of the Doctor - I have it in my head that Colin Baker is the only exception in the Classic series era. Hartnell was something like fourth choice for the role originally. There are parallel universes out there where Geoffrey Bayldon, Michael Bentine, Dermot Crowley and Chiwetel Ejiofor (to name but a few) are enjoying weekly Saturday teatime TARDIS adventures. Now, if you're not up to date with the current series of Doctor Who, stop reading now, but talk of parallel universes where someone else is playing the Doctor leads me inevitably to the most recent (at the time of writing) episode of Doctor Who, Fugitive of the Judoon. They played a blinder, didn't they? Clever misdirection, a returning alien, a lovely cameo from a significant character (who I can't believe isn't coming back very soon) and a new incarnation of our hero. Lovely. It's good that the show still can surprise us, and can dip into these (potentially - Chibnall's not giving anything away) counterfactual narratives from time to time in the main show. And I assume Big Finish will one day make a long-running audio series of the 'Ruth' Doctor, and every other one of those I listed above - I'm sure they can get someone who can impersonate Michael Bentine...

In Summary:

This blog post is - presumably, and hopefully - the last time I'll have to type out the word 'crack' quite so many times (unless I get some sort of admin job for a chain of waxing salons, perhaps). 

Spyfall

Chapter The 145th, is the Story of O (but not the naughty Story of O, obviously).

Plot:

[A brand new pair of episodes with big plot reveals, so beware spoilers, sweeties! I even left a respectful couple of weeks - and the broadcast of another story - as a gap to let things settle, so no excuses - be warned!]

The Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz are called in by MI6 to investigate a spate of attacks on spies around the globe, where the victim's body has been altered, infiltrated by alien DNA. They meet 'C' - a code name for the head of the secret service, to protect his identity, even though he's clearly Stephen Fry - who gives them a lead just before he's assassinated. A British social media CEO billionaire, Daniel Barton, who once was an MI6 agent but who may now have been turned, is involved. Ryan and Yaz investigate him under the cover of being journalist and photographer. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Graham track down an ex-operative who had a special interest in extra-terrestrial activity, 'O', and talk with him at his hideout in the Australian outback. Glowing pan-dimensional aliens attack Yaz and transport her to the Upside Down (or its slightly cheaper equivalent); they also attack O's hideout. O and the Doctor manage to capture one, but it swaps places with Yaz. The Doctor picks up Ryan in the TARDIS, and they're all together again. During the interview with Barton, he'd mentioned his imminent birthday celebrations, so the TARDIS team and O gatecrash. The Doctor confronts Barton, but he makes a break for it and they pursue in a big James Bond-esque chase sequence. They all end up hiding in the back of Barton's private jet as it takes off. But O reveals himself to be the Master before transporting himself away; Barton has already left the plane, and there's instead a bomb on the pilot's seat. The glowy aliens (the Kasaavin - double-A actually!) attack the Doctor, who vanishes into the knock-off Upside Down.

The bomb blows up and the jet descends, but the Doctor's three friends find clues that she has somehow left inside the plane to help them land it safely. In the Upside Down, the Doctor meets Ada Lovelace who has been brought here many times through her life for the Kasaavin to study her. When Ada is returned to her own time, the Doctor catches a lift, but the Master follows them to that time and starts attacking people. With Ada's help the Doctor escapes. At Babbage's place, the Doctor finds a moving sculpture, the Silver Lady, which Babbage was given years before, which seems to be a device for helping the Kasaavin project themselves into our universe. The Doctor uses it as a way to time travel back to the present, but Ada tags along, knocking them off course to Paris 1943, where they meet Noor Inayat Khan, the first female wireless operator working undercover for the SOE. The Master follows, now posing as a Nazi officer. The Doctor manages to get him to monologue his plan. The Kasaavin are alien spies from another dimension, and the Master's provided them and Barton a new scheme - turn the human race into database servers, using the storage capacity of human DNA. The Kasaavin have been using the knowledge of technology experts like Ada through history to help in this aim. Meanwhile, following instructions from the Doctor, Noor sends a false message to the Allies that the Master has been passing on secrets, dropping him in it. While he's being arrested, the Doctor steals his TARDIS and makes off with Ada and Noor.

in the present day, Barton instigates the plan - the Silver Lady activates, and the Kasaavin appear en masse. Yaz and Ryan have tracked the device down, and the Master (who's had to live through the years 1943 to 2020) catches up with them too. But the Doctor has altered the Silver Lady in the past, and it stops working. Barton escapes, but not the Master - the Kasaavin surround him, and spirit him away. The Doctor returns Ada and Noor - taking a detour first to set up Barton's plane with the clues the others will need to land it - and wipes their memories of her. Following hints that the Master had dropped, the Doctor then travels to Gallifrey to find it has been destroyed. A recorded holographic message of the Master plays in the TARDIS, where he explains that it was he who did this, as retribution for a mysterious lie that the Time Lords have told relating to the Timeless Child...

Context:

This story marks the start of the fourth new series to be broadcast while I've been doing the blog. Given the random order concept to which I try to adhere, this always begs the question of whether the show being back on TV is sufficient reason to override the randomiser and blog a story from the new set, and - if so - which one. If something is significant enough, such as the very first story for a new Doctor, then it's a no-brainer; but otherwise, one needs a system. I'd a while back settled on the idea of choosing one story from the upcoming series at random in advance, rather than always blogging the first story of the new series. It seemed like a good balance: mark the occasion, but still keep a chance factor involved. The trouble is that this approach only works if one knows the number of stories to be broadcast in advance, and this information hasn't really been released.

Ten episodes have been filmed (even that might be a supposition, and not technically on record), but a number of them have been reported to be two-parters, with no official confirmation as yet as to which. The current production team are so tight-lipped about any plot details that most of the series' story titles hadn't been released when Spyfall was broadcast. The series in 2018 was the same, with a few titles being released at a time gradually as the series progressed. It's great for avoiding leaks (the major plot points within Spyfall took pretty much everyone by surprise, I think), but left me with the only real option being to blog a story of my choice, and it might as well be the opening story. It was fairly significant, I suppose, being the festive offering, and the first show broadcast for a year. Anyway, a couple of days after the broadcast of the second part, I watched the two episodes again back to back from the PVR recording (as I'm old school, I'm still recording new episodes even though they are available, and will be seemingly forever, on iplayer).

First time round:

Watched the first part on New Year's Day 2020 live on its BBC1 broadcast, and then the second when it was broadcast a few day's later in the usual series Sunday night slot. I was accompanied by the whole family (Better Half, boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7). Youngest child, who has avoided most Jodie Whittaker episodes up to now thinking they're too frightening, sat down and watched both episodes without any worries (alas, Orphan 55 a week later gave both the younger two nightmares). The Better Half was happily watching the first episode, but not engaged enough that she didn't take a phone call during the show, and missed the big plot reveals towards the end! Luckily clips of the significant moment were all over social media afterwards for her to view. Sweetly, the youngest watched the moment of the Doctor sitting forlorn in the console room after witnessing the ruins of Gallifrey, and seeing the usually orange crystal buttresses had turned blue said "The TARDIS is sad!".

Reaction:

Spyfall is two parts, each an hour long, making it one of the longest duration stories in the whole of post-2005 Doctor Who. Only The End of Time and (if you count them as one three part story like I do) Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords rack up more minutes of entertainment. In terms of season openers, it is shorter only than one story from the 1960s in the whole history of the series since it began. It is big, and in more than one sense: the action begins with brief scenes across the globe, with large point font captions on screen to tell us where in the world we are, giving an instant sense of scale (a similar trick to that which was pulled off in Resolution a year before), the music is suitably espionage-esque, and everything looks widescreen and million dollar budget. For the next hour, we get the full throttle Bond pastiche, with far flung exotic locales, gadgets, men in black, chases, explosions, tense pauses as USB sticks take ages to gradually download data - that sort of thing. There's also the wonderful sequence at Barton's casino-themed birthday party with everyone in a tux, which includes perhaps the most 13th Doctor-ish joke so far, where she thinks she's playing Snap while everyone else is playing Blackjack. Jodie Whittaker is amazing in the role, and must surely be hero to all the new generation of youngsters tuning in for the first time these last couple of years.

Why are they doing a spy pastiche, fun as it is? Because the Kasaavin are alien spies. Why are they spies? Well, who cares? It's fine and it's fun. Fry is great at having a slightly more serious jab at the Special Intelligence 'Control' character that he used to play for laughs in his A Bit of Fry and Laurie days. It's obvious casting, but not unwelcome for that. Lenny Henry is also great at playing the smarmy social media CEO villain, tying the espionage theme in to the nefarious treatment of our data by these huge companies over recent years. It's a shame that the full-on spy film ambience stops at the mid-point, The second episode goes off at what at first appears to be a tangent, arriving at the 19th century, and then WW2. The theme of modern smartphone / social media technology being a spy in our pocket brings all the separate threads about technology and espionage together at the end, just about, but I have to admit - though I loved the second episode - it would have been fun to have a whole second episode of knockabout Bond, blasts and banter. Occasional inter-cutting of Graham, Yaz and Ryan's antics on the run, using silly gadgets and outwitting Barton, was some consolation.

The change of speed, look and feel of the second half was deliberate - they hired a different director for part 2, after all. The rompy runaround develops into something a bit deeper as we focus on a pair of pioneering women. I knew a lot about Ada Lovelace (and Babbage), but nothing about Noor. It prompted me to look her up, as I hope it did for lots of others watching - it's a brave and sad story, and the Doctor's parting line to her, "Bonne chance", is all the more poignant when one finds out that a year on from the events we've seen, she will die in Dachau. Aside from the Silver Lady statue being a bit of a clumsy device, my only other criticism of this story is that Ada and Noor could both have been centre of an individual story on their own. It's a bit of a waste that it's all so whistle-stop, and they have to share the limelight with the Master and all the spy shenanigans. It is great, though, that the world is saved by a trio of intelligent women. This team-up also means there's room elsewhere to focus on the Doctor's three friends, once they are separated from her. In their stories thus far, Thirteen and 'fam' have worked together, remaining close even when splitting up temporarily into smaller groups. Here, the three companions are apart from the Doctor for a whole episode, not only giving us a chance to see how they've grown into the adventuring life so that they can operate without her, but also giving space for them to question the mystery of the Doctor, and how much they really know. Also, having myself wondered this last January, it was nice to have the early scenes explain how Graham, Ryan and Yaz's ordinary lives are continuing, with Ryan persevering with battling his dyspraxia, and Yaz still retaining her police job.

There are lots of wonderful touches throughout the two hour running time. Stakes are raised early on when the Kasaavin are shown to be able to walk through the TARDIS door. Stephen Fry's character dies saying "Oh!" giving us a huge clue as to the identity of his assassin. The Master's "Did I ever apologise for that?" line about Jodrell Bank (a reference back to the Master and Doctor's tussle on top of the radio telescope in Logopolis). The Doctor at the beginning with the TARDIS in a garage elevated, so she can work on the underside as if its a car. This last moment I enjoyed, but it annoyed people online, who muttered about how it's impossible as the box is in a different dimension to the TARDIS interior works, blah, blah, blah. I think this is a silly thing to get worked up about. Some other online criticisms were more fair, though. There was some disquiet about the Doctor taking a certain amount of pleasure at leaving the non-white Master to the mercy of the Nazis, but this is I think supposed to balanced against the moral outrage she'd earlier displayed for him working with them in the first place, and we pretty soon see that he has come out of it unscathed. The memory wipes too gave rise to some comments online. The morality of this approach was discussed in stories during Steven Moffat's tenure (in the Russell T Davies era, no one thought twice - Torchwood were ret-conning people every week). Does the Doctor have the right to take people's memories away, even if it's for their own good? Here, though, it was only about allowing Ada to keep her historical agency - her achievements remain her own, and not down to her experiencing alien influences.

A lot is packed in to these episodes; as well as everything else, a major part of this story is the introduction of a new incarnation of the Master, which again in the past could have taken up a whole story on its own. Sacha Dhawan is an inspired choice, and works very well against Whittaker's Doctor. He will undoubtedly return, possibly before the series is finished, and I'm looking forward to it. It's got to be a compliment to an actor that a performance leaves you wanting more, and Dhawan manages it twice, for both the performances he gives in this story. Not only is the big revelation at the end of part 1 a major plot twist, it's a great shame too, as O was such a nice character. I almost wanted it not to be true as I was up to that point very keen for O to be a future returning ally. I'll hold on to judgement about the other big revelations about Gallifrey and the Time Lords, as they haven't fully played out yet. But, if Gallifrey is finally gone (again), I'm not too bothered - it is a very dull place whenever we end up back there. Though, given it took every Dalek in existence to fail to destroy it last time, it does stretch credibility a bit to imagine the Master managing it on his own. Or perhaps he wasn't on his own. Unless this is all part of the arc, we'll probably only find out when the next showrunner revisits the moment in a few years' time to undo it! 

Connectivity: 

Both Spyfall and The Time Warrior were the first stories broadcast of a new series of Doctor Who; in both stories, scientists are plucked out of their correct time zone and transplanted to another, where they end up helping a single member of a more advanced race (the Doctor is more benign than Linx, though).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Unreal McCoy? Seriously, what is up with the secrecy of this current Doctor Who production team? It used to be that the cast of Doctor Who stories were revealed as they were being made. Like everyone else, I only found out that Sacha Dhawan was in Spyfall when he appeared midway through episode 1 on January 1st. They cut every frame of him from the scenes he appeared in that were featured in the trailer! Now, you might think that this was additional secrecy because he was playing a significant character, but other actors who didn't turn out to be old enemies were treated the same. Only in the trail at the end of Spyfall part 2 did it get revealed that James Buckley was appearing in Doctor Who the following week. And did any audience member know Laura Fraser was in Orphan 55 until she actually appeared in Orphan 55? Laura flippin' Fraser - she's been in Breaking Bad! As I mentioned above, it's not just casting decisions where the chance of publicity is being passed up in favour of surprise - it's story titles too. Up to two days before the broadcast of the latest episode, nothing had been revealed of the titles of any stories following it. It used to be a traditional ritual that the Radio Times in the week of any new series starting would include a full run-down of the titles up to the finale. This ritual is sadly no more.

If the show is getting less advance publicity in the Radio Times, though, it means there is another thing in common between Jodie Whittaker's run and the tenure of another Doctor, Sylvester McCoy. I have been musing on this for a while now, like a typical human seeing patterns in things that possibly aren't there. I have a slightly sketchy theory that the post 2005 eras are following a superficially similar pattern to those of the 1963 to 1989 period, but at a faster rate. Refer to the Deeper Thoughts section of The Mysterious Planet for more details, but to my mind new Doctor Who has now reached the equivalent of the late 1980s, and Jodie is running in parallel with Sylvester. Look at the (circumstantial) evidence: both Doctors started with big changes to the 'front of house', new title sequence, new arrangement of the theme music. Behind the scenes, a new person took charge of the writing making a big effort to use new writers, and break with the long history of the show, with the first year of both Jodie and Sylv being free of too much in the way of returning elements (unlike McCoy's script editor Andrew Cartmel, current showrunner Chris Chibnall didn't have someone more senior like John-Nathan Turner insisting on giving roles to a couple of previous guest turns, so 2018 was even more pure and unsullied than 1987). More 'right on' political subtexts were introduced by both compared to their recent predecessors too. The show in both cases went through scheduling changes, no longer being broadcast on Saturdays; both runs were on air for fewer weeks of the year than in the recent past.

Now that a few more episodes and a trailer have been shown since that first Jodie series, there are even more echoes. The very next story after that first run, was - as it was for Sylv - a Dalek story. The second year for both Doctors includes much more continuity and fan service; this year, the Cybermen are going to return just as they did in 1988. The biggest emerging similarity, though, is that - just as Cartmel did in his second year - Chibnall is bringing back some mystery about the origins of Gallifrey and the Time Lords. Even though the show (new or old epoch) has been going many, many years, we don't know the whole story. The Master's line in Spyfall "Everything that you think you know is a lie" and the mentions of the mysterious Timeless Child are both very reminiscent of the hints dropped in the McCoy stories of his second and third years. The backstory sketched out to explain all that, which might never have been fully spelled out on screen, became known later - when the series was off the air for many years, and it was being used as a touchstone for the stories being continued in other media - as the Cartmell Masterplan. It looks very much like Chibnall might be attempting to pull off the same trick.

Now, this could prove to be dangerous; it was certainly a bold move in the late 1980s, when Doctor Who had been on air for 25 years, for a young script editor to try and bring back the mystery again, and it does beg the obvious question "Why have you never mentioned any of this stuff before?!" But in a series where the lead character's home planet and people has been destroyed, then turned out not have been destroyed after all, and now have been destroyed again, anything is possible. The other significant factors mitigating against any risk are the resources and support available to the current series to make it work - the major difference between the Whittaker and McCoy eras, and something of which those striving to keep Doctor Who interesting thirty-odd years ago, could only dream.

In Summary:

The satisfying start of the Chibnall Masterplan!