Circuit Breaker (June + July 2026)

Chapter the 349th, is a bit of a multimedia event. The first bit, in fact.

Plot:

[Spoiler alert: with our favourite Time Lord having been dematerialised from TV - more whinging about that later - the Circuit Breaker epic is the nearest fans will get to a new season of Doctor Who in 2026; so, if you're planning to experience any part of it, best to do so before you read this.] Petronella Osgood runs UNIT's black archive, aided by her assistant Andrew Turner. One evening, Osgood receives an emergency message from Turner, who is working late alone in the archive. He reports that a Dalek gunstick appeared from nowhere nearby where he was working, crackling with time energy. Soon, other time-displaced objects appear too, all connected to the Doctor's adventures. A mysterious someone appears to be using these to unravel the Doctor's timeline and create a time instability that could destroy the world. Osgood and Turner need to call in the Doctor, but it can only be a Doctor from before the time periods from which the different objects originate. There is only one candidate, the so-called Fugitive Doctor (who they know of from Yasmin Khan's testimony). They both talk to her on a space-time phone and she is persuaded to help. She arrives at UNIT HQ. Armed with the Resistor - a gizmo Turner built to neutralise time energy - she goes on a trial run. Then, on her first mission proper, she returns the Dalek gunstick.

This Doctor, of course, has never heard of the Daleks. The mission takes her to Ancient Greece, and involves the creation of a giant wooden Dalek, or Trojan Dalek if you will. It also involves the unfortunate massacre of a cute bunch of aliens called the Meliki. The Doctor accomplishes the mission and returns to UNIT. Next, the Doctor travels to rural Italy in 1894 to return a Sontaran mace and handcuffs. This time she has Turner in tow to keep an eye on her. They find a lone one of the militaristic Potato Heads running the local criminal brotherhood, wanting to set himself up as mayor. The Doctor stops him from sacrificing a villager (and narrowly avoids being sacrificed herself). The Sontaran, who gets away, appears to be working with a mysterious hooded figure. That figure monitors the Doctor from somewhere on the edge of the solar system. Back at UNIT HQ, another of the time-displaced objects, a memory worm, has started to metamorphosise. When the Doctor handles it, she is transported back in to a memory of her time working for the Division, dealing with a doomsday weapon, some Sontarans and a bunch of Cybermen. Through all these adventures, there is friction between the Doctor and her two UNIT handlers when she doesn't behave as they expect the Doctor should do.

To be continued...

Context:

I have decided to experience each and every part of the extended universe epic that is Circuit Breaker. If Doctor Who was on television in 2026 it no doubt wouldn't have occurred to me to do such a thing, let alone to post about it in chunks on the blog. Well, maybe. My entering a longer than originally anticipated period of uncertainty about when (if?) Doctor Who would return to TV was a factor, but it wasn't the only one. Long-term readers of the blog will have picked up a sizeable amount of skepticism at the time from me about Time Lord Victorious (2020), and Doom's Day (2023). Those previous two attempts to create one overarching story composed of multiple different tie-in tales (audios, novels, comics, etc.) had significant flaws regarding their appeal. Circuit Breaker has learned from those attempts and improved things. Time Lord Victorious was just too sprawling to fully grasp, let alone enjoy. Doom's Day simplified things by using the Aristotelian unity of time. The story featured a continuous 24 hours of a character's experience, with each part comprising one or more of those hours. The main issue, though, was the protagonist was an all-new character in which fans had minimal emotional engagement. For Circuit Breaker, two of the main characters are both existing fan favourites. One, Osgood, is a fairly known quantity. The other, though, is the Fugitive Doctor as played by Jo Martin, a character ripe for exploration. Getting to know this character a little better was a sufficient extra draw for me to put aside my previous skepticism.

It also helps that the format has been simplified even more - Circuit Breaker is a simple peripatetic quest narrative. In fact, it's the same idea as the Key to Time season (Doctor Who's first attempt at creating one overarching story composed of multiple self-contained parts, in a Tom Baker series of the late 1970s), but in reverse. In each of Baker's stories, an object needed to be be taken from a different planet to form part of a mysterious source of power. In Circuit Breaker, various objects must be returned to the planets they originated from in order to stop them forming part of a mysterious source of power. The first four stories of the epic were released in the summer of 2026. A short story, Calling the Doctor, became available for free on the official UNIT website on the 25th June. It was then followed by three other stories in July, all of them requiring one to put one's hand in one's pocket. Titan Comics published Adversary of the Daleks on the 8th, Panini gave away comic The Honourable Society alongside issue 632 of Doctor Who Magazine on the 23rd, and BBC Audio released The Deadliest Weapon on the 30th of the month. I re-read or re-listened to each of them in order early in August, after acquiring them in slightly the wrong sequence (see First Time Round section below). I also read the pretend messages between Osgood and Turner on the UNIT website's homepage (or, as it is styled, Inbox) that provide fun connective tissue between the adventures proper, and a useful way to keep up with the overall plot if you're not buying every part.

First Time Round:

I usually cover stories in random order here, but Circuit Breaker will be done serially. Each part of the epic stands alone, but many are too slight to cover individually. If I was having to batch them up (covering a month's worth of releases per post will, I believe, allow me to do them justice) shuffling them into random batches seemed just a bit too silly. I did obtain these first few parts in slightly the wrong order, though, retaining some of the blog's usual chaos. The first part, the scene-setting Calling The Doctor by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson, I read second. The first I read was the third one published, The Honourable Society (story by Jason Quinn, art by Anthony Williams). I subscribe to Doctor Who Magazine, so obtaining that part was frictionless: it literally fell into my lap as I emptied the delivery envelope. It was only on reading it that I decided to experience and blog each and every part of Circuit Breaker, and so went back to the beginning. Titan Comics were ultimately going to contribute two comic books to Circuit Breaker, and I didn't want to pay Forbidden Planet two postage and packing fees; as such, I waited a short while until early August when Titan released their second contribution and ordered that together with Adversary of the Daleks (story by Dan Watters and Dulce Montoya, art by Roberta Ingranata). By then, I had already downloaded The Deadliest Weapon (by Steve Lyons) using a spare credit on Audible. This meant that I got them in the order 3, 1, 4, 2, which is one way to represent Pi. That feels somewhat appropriate for an epic with the circular title of Circuit Breaker. Or maybe I just need to get out more.

Reaction:

As mentioned above, one strength of Circuit Breaker as a whole is that those planning and collating its different parts have kept the overall structure into which those parts fit as simple as possible. This probably has a slightly negative impact on some of the early parts in and of themselves, though. The scene-setting Calling the Doctor is nothing but a prologue, though it's nicely epistolary, comprising a collection of emails and transcripts of conversations between the key players at UNIT and the Fugitive Doctor. There's also a tiny bit of puzzle-solving required, with some hidden words to which the reader needs to pay attention. It ends without that much having happened, though. The comic books Adversary of the Daleks and The Honourable Society need to establish the structural conceit. So, they both involve the Doctor arriving somewhere, getting into a bit of bother with aliens, sorting that out (in a way that's a little too callous compared to the Doctor that we're used to) and replacing a time-displaced object. Given that these two were not going to deviate from that pattern, it might have been better to make sure they differed in the more superficial elements of window dressing (as in the usual trick of Doctor Who on television, following up an episode set in the past with one in the future, and so on). Alas, both stories involve travelling to a European country in historical times (Ancient Greece, 19th Century Italy) to find a lone member of a top tier Doctor Who monster race (Dalek, Sontaran) who is bullying the locals, and then confronting and defeating them.

It's not to say these parts don't have their moments, probably best amongst them is the Fugitive Doctor responding "What the heck is a Dalek?" near the start of Adversary, and then having her first conversation with a Dalek, oblivious of its nature. I also have to reserve a small percentage of my judgement given that I don't know how things will fully pan out (the final parts of the epic have not been released at the time of writing); for all I know, any small moment in any of these parts might turn out to be an essential set-up for the finale. The only moments that felt like that were the brief scenes included in each of the latter three of these first four parts of the mysterious figure spying on the Doctor from afar. Who is this Machiavellian manipulator? No, really, that's not rhetorical: I don't have a Scooby as at this current moment. As well as the plot easter egg arc elements, there's also an emotional through-line. Osgood and Turner are continually shocked at the Doctor's behaviour, expecting her to be more like the type of Doctor she will one day turn out to be. She in turn bristles at being so defined and confined. There's a hint, though, that she is turning gradually into something of a hero as the epic progresses. This feels as if it will be the most rewarding part of this epic, developing the Fugitive Doctor's character while no doubt retaining her cranky, sassy no-nonsense exterior. In these first few parts, there are only baby steps along that route, so it will be interesting to see how it continues in the later parts.

Only The Deadliest Weapon, fourth and final part of this first batch, gets to do something different and a bit more in depth. Because of an interaction with a memory worm, the Doctor gets to re-experience an adventure with Cybermen that she had before she became a fugitive. This is the Doctor when she was involved in a shady mission for the mysterious Division; hearing of this, we get to understand something of her buried trauma from those days. Meanwhile, Osgood tries to break through from the real world to snap her out of it, and this establishes a somewhat deeper relationship between the two of them. The story is also lifted by a great reading of the audiobook text by Jo Martin. The comics have great artwork and capture good likenesses, and the budget for the epic has stretched to a new set of photographs featuring the three principal cast of the epic with new costumes and props. But nothing beats performances, and Martin effortlessly breathes life into almost all of the guest characters (the Cyber Leader is the one exception, voiced as it is by 1980s who stalwart David Banks), making each distinct. It doesn't hurt either that there is a clever, timey-wimey plot reversal towards the end of the story. The initial set-up parts aside from The Deadliest Weapon don't really have room for plot reversals. In summary then, this first batch is a tasty enough set of hor d'ourves, but it would be nice to have something more substantial soon.

Connectivity:

Like the TV movie's 4K restoration, this first batch of Circuit Breaker features the Daleks; also, both tangentially feature the Cybermen (okay very tangentially in the TV movie's case, they are referenced with a bag of gold dust; in The Deadliest Weapon, they are just a memory from an old adventure). Circuit Breaker also features a mysterious figure manipulating events and observing the Fugitive Doctor from afar; that person could be the Master potentially. Though that would be a bit too obvious, I'd have thought.

Deeper Thoughts:

Back to the Wilderness - 1 of 3: Lost in the Dark Dimension. The BBC have announced that they aren't making any new series of Doctor Who imminently, but have assured fans that it still has a future with the corporation. The show will be back following a break, though nobody is willing to estimate how long that break might be. The Beeb are seeking an independent production company to make the show with them, and already some contenders for such a partnership have made their interest public. Okay. Please do me a small favour: read those sentences back and tell me whether I'm writing about 2026 or 1990? The similarities are so striking that - even though the circumstances aren't precisely the same - I hope we long-term fans can be forgiven for a certain amount of pessimism. After the final series of Doctor Who's original run finished in 1989, the situation was as outlined above, and yet it took sixteen more years before another series of the programme aired. This was despite much interest in making such a series being expressed by various parties through the early 1990s and then throughout the period that afterward has become known as the Wilderness Years. The phrase used in 2026 for seeking co-production partners for the series "put out to tender" is just a little too much like "put out to pasture" for comfort. Every fan of a certain age or certain outlook is united in believing we have now entered the Wilderness Years Mark 2 (or 3, depending on your numbering protocol, i.e. whether you think the blip that was the single Doctor Who story broadcast during the period held the wilderness at bay sufficiently to start a new epoch).

Looking back, perhaps it was a bad omen in March 2026 when the end became nigh for what previously seemed an unassailable edifice to Doctor Who's glory years, one that only months before had seemed to me to be something that would always be around (see the Deeper Thoughts of this blog post for more details). Once such a totem as Ianto's Shrine is destroyed, anything can happen. You may say I'm a doomsayer, but I'm not the only one. Doctor Who writer and performer Mark Gatiss was interviewed in August 2026 and was quoted as saying "We've been here before", drawing similar parallels to 36 years ago. He suggested the show is probably due a long break, such that the next showrunner can be someone "who grew up with David Tennant as the Doctor, rather than Tom Baker". I don't know if he's speaking here as an industry insider or a superfan, probably a bit of a both. I suspect that however much he says he's okay with the situation, his inner superfan is desperately wanting to be proved wrong, searching for any significant factor that's different in 2026 from how things were in 1990. There's the commissioned Cbeebies series that Blue Zoo are working on, which - if delivered - would be a sure sign of commitment to the franchise. Never mind pre-school animations, the first Wilderness Years saw a production company (variously called Daltenreys, Coast to Coast and Greenlight Productions) working on a blockbuster Doctor Who movie. That was never delivered, and the same fate could befall Blue Zoo's effort. Even the announced and then cancelled 2026 Christmas Special echoes the 30th anniversary special The Dark Dimension. This planned straight-to-video opus got many column inches in news-hungry 1993 before being canned. At least it had some kind of storyline before that happened, though, which is more than one can say for its 21st century counterpart.

Since the BBC's announcement about the future of Doctor Who in June, I have tried and failed to fathom what anyone hoped to achieve in announcing a Christmas special they seemingly didn't intend to make. Russell T Davies, in his Instagram post following up that June press release, said they had "cooked that up to guarantee a future when no one knew what would happen, but now we do know, there’s no need for it". But it guaranteed nothing, and neither did the June announcement. The only possible outcome was getting people's hopes up. The October 2025 announcement gave everyone a source of optimism that would only ever last if what was promised actually materialised. That's what happens when you make statements of intent and then backtrack a few months later. And if they can do that for a special, they can do the same for a series. It's extra annoying as it means we cannot move on (even for only an hour) from the weird Billie Piper cameo ending of the last broadcast Who episode. Having something a bit more open and less WTF might have better allowed Big Finish and Doctor Who Magazine and Titan Comics and all the rest to extrapolate into new extended universe offerings. As it is, they can only look backward. This doesn't mean it can't be interesting, of course. One of the only key differences between now and then is embodied in the Circuit Breaker epic: so many licensees producing new Doctor Who content in a coordinated and professional way. There was no 1990 equivalent (one can only imagine what would have been produced by Target books, BBC Video, Marvel and Dapol working together back then, but it wasn't a realistic prospect). So, as it's all we've got, bring on the next part of the epic. May it shine a light for us through this new wilderness...

In Summary:

Circuit activated...

The Invasion

Chapter the 328th, re: UNIT, and it feels so good.

Plot:

After narrowly avoiding a missile attack on the dark side of the Moon, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land on Earth sometime in the late 20th century (we could argue forever about exactly when). The TARDIS is on the blink and becomes invisible. To fix it, the Doctor needs to work on some circuits, and trying to get help with this embroils him in the machinations of a global electronics corporation, International Electromatics. The head of this company is Tobias Vaughn, and he's in league with the Cybermen planning an invasion of the Earth. The TARDIS team meet Isobel Watkins, an aspiring photographer in swinging 60s (or 70s or possibly even 80s) London; her uncle went to work for IE and hasn't been seen since. Investigating this, the Doctor and Jamie are picked up by UNIT, a military taskforce run by the Colonel Lethbridge Stewart that they previously met fighting against the Yeti in the London Underground, who has now been promoted to Brigadier. UNIT has been keeping tabs on IE and Vaughn: people who have gone in to IE headquarters have come out changed, under Cyber control. There are also mysterious extra circuits in IE devices, and the Doctor can't immediately discern their purpose.

Vaughn is planning to double-cross the Cybermen, and is using Professor Watkins for this purpose. The Professor has invented a prototype teaching machine that provokes emotions in the user; Vaughn kidnaps Isobel and Zoe to coerce Watkins into turning his device into an anti-Cyberman weapon. The Doctor, Jamie and UNIT rescue the two women, but Vaughn bluffs the Professor and he finishes the job. UNIT then rescue the Professor before Vaughn can mass produce the machine. The Cyber army are hidden in the sewer system of London, and Isobel, Jamie and Zoe almost get killed trying to get photographic evidence of their presence. The invasion begins when a hypnotic signal, boosted by the hidden circuits in IE equipment, takes over the populace (the Doctor, UNIT and Co have a method of resisting the signal). The Cybermen emerge from the sewers and attack. The Doctor goes to the IE headquarters and persuades Vaughn that he can't control the Cybermen. They use the Professor's device to fight their way to the IE transmitter, with UNIT battling the Cybermen around them. Vaughn is killed, but transmission of the hypnotic signal is switched off. There are a tense few minutes while everyone waits to see if a missile will destroy the Cyber ship on the dark side of the moon before it can launch an attack on Earth. It does. Later, after the Doctor has mended the TARDIS circuits, the TARDIS team leave for new adventures.

Context:

The random number generator that dictates the order in which I blog Doctor Who stories indicated that it was time to cover my final black-and-white 1960s story, my final story with episodes missing from the archives, and - potentially - my final Cyberman story. I watched the version from the DVD, which has animated first and fourth episodes paired with the surviving soundtracks. I viewed the story spaced out over about two weeks of early May, accompanied by the Better Half for the early episodes. As this is one of her favourite eras of the show, and she was intrigued by the animation, I was able to persuade her to watch at first. Once the animated episodes were over, she lost interest and left me to watch the rest alone. 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era, with the second Doctor joining the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth Doctors, to make it 11 on the 'done' pile so far. It also marks the completion of another season with 37 completed out of the 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

I first saw The Invasion when it was released on VHS in 1993. It was the first tape released - in a range that had started a good few years before in the mid-1980s - that was presented as a self-contained story but had episodes missing because they were no longer in the BBC's archive. Starting a couple of years earlier, there had been tapes that collected together orphaned Who episodes within a documentary framing; these, though, had made no effort to contextualise the surviving material within the overall narrative. The Invasion plugged the gaps in the same way as the 1991 VHS release of Shada, which had sections that were unfinished rather than lost: an actor from the story (in the case of The Invasion, this was Brigadier actor Nicholas Courtney) gave a brief to-camera precis of what the viewer had missed. It's fair to say that Courtney's links were not detailed (his material lasted three minutes, and that included credits and a preamble where Courtney introduces himself and the character of the Brig). My first opportunity to experience the two missing episodes fully (or as fully as then possible) was in November 2004 when their audio, alongside that for the other extant episodes, was released on CD as part of a Cyberman box set. Finally, I got to see the two episodes with moving pictures when the aforementioned DVD, with animation plugging the gaps, was released in November 2006.

Reaction:

Doctor Who is famously the show with the flexible format that can go anywhere and anywhen, telling any kind of story. Equally famously though, it is a show that exists to serve a broad audience (it was brought into being in 1963 to keep all ages amused between sport and pop programming on a Saturday night, and was still performing this role in mid-May 2025 when one Ncuti Gatwa episode nestled in the BBC1 schedules between the year's FA Cup Final and Eurovision Song Contest). Throughout its history, the programme has thus swung between the experimental and the crowd-pleasingly formulaic. The Invasion comes during such a swing. Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin, who were effectively co-producers by this point, had taken over gradually from the previous producer / script editor team of Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis. With input from a scientific advisor Kit Pedlar, Lloyd and Davis had hit upon a successful formula for Doctor Who that had been used increasingly throughout Patrick Troughton's time as the Doctor: a base under siege by a monster of the week. By the season before The Invasion, this template was used for all but one story, with Yeti, Cybermen, Ice Warriors and sentient seaweed all getting a chance or two to kill or take over members of isolated, locked-in communities one by one before the Doctor defeated them. The formula had served its purpose and then some, and it was definitely time for a change. The first two stories of Troughton's third and final season preceding The Invasion were wildly different, both from what went before and from each other. But with experiment comes risk. Sherwin and Bryant wanted to create the certainty of a new winning formula, and The Invasion was a trial for an approach that they wanted to apply to every story from the next season onwards.

Though the storyline for The Invasion came from Kit Pedlar, and there are a few links to the most recent previous Cyberman adventure The Wheel In Space (the metal meanies use of a signal to control humans, and our heroes use of depolarisers worn at the back of the neck to combat this, are callbacks to that story), it is much more focussed on the future shape of Doctor Who than the past. The action doesn't take place on alien planets or in space, it's set on Earth, with the monsters coming to us; the characters aren't stuck in one base represented by a big set in Television Centre, but able to roam to many different places, many of them outdoors and filmed on location. The Doctor has a team to support him in banishing large-scale invasions too big to be handled just by him and the couple of friends with whom he tended to travel: UNIT was born. Leading this team was the Lethbridge-Stewart character, promoted to Brigadier, reused from a popular story of the previous season The Web of Fear. The Web of Fear - directed, like The Invasion, by Douglas Camfield - was very much a base under siege story, but had one key action sequence (the attack by Yeti in Covent Garden) that inspired many similar set pieces in The Invasion. Like in Web, there is a significant military presence in terms of both soldiers and hardware. The story world is expanded beyond the parochial, though: rather than the troops being from the British army as they were in Web, these are a United Nations taskforce (the story even involves an offscreen Russian missile team) with an investigative remit that allows for some espionage as well as shooting and blowing things up. The set-up has lots of potential, and would serve as the model for a lot of the Jon Pertwee era stories. It's not without drawbacks, though.

The importance of the Doctor and his companions is diluted by being part of a bigger team. Jamie is missing throughout the latter part of the story; part of this is because the actor was on holiday for an episode, but even when Fraser Hines is present in the studio, his character spends the best part of a whole episode asleep. His usual role of being the Doctor's minder isn't needed when the Doctor has the assistance of his own army. Early on, though, when the protagonists are more in investigative mode, there's some fun to be had in the sequences where Jamie and henchman Packer (played mostly for comedy by Peter Halliday) indulge in one-upmanship, squabbling like a pair of children. The Troughton Doctor too seems a bit diminished by becoming part of a professional investigation outfit; his usual schtick is to lure his enemies into a false sense of security by appearing to be bumbling and absent minded, but he can't really do this when he's in a role of expert advisor. There's the odd nice moment smuggled in - the Doctor undercutting tense sequences by stopping to play cards with Jamie, or posing for photographs - but in general, he just has to be serious and professional, which doesn't fit well. The series would struggle for quite a while in the Jon Pertwee era to square the circle of finding the fallible, human element in a serious establishment organisation: if its creator Sydney Newman was right, and Doctor Who needs a kid to make mistakes and get into trouble, why would UNIT hire such a person? Nepotism was the answer they finally decided upon, with Jo Grant having secured a job at UNIT because of a powerful relative.

In The Invasion, it is left to the character of Isobel Watkins to trip up herself and others into jeopardy, but she isn't sympathetic enough to provide the necessary heart. Her romance with a UNIT captain isn't given much air time, and doesn't convince when it is. The script also tends to patronise her and the other younger characters. The Brig casually disregards Isobel's evident knowledge of photography, and later refers to her, Zoe and Jamie as "crazy kids" when they venture into the sewers to secure evidence of the Cybermen. The Brig has only been involved in one and a half alien invasions, whereas Jamie and Zoe see off monsters every week; he should show them more respect. A lot of the early part of the story focusses on the fate of Isobel's uncle Professor Watkins, taken captive by Tobias Vaughn; once he's rescued, though, he disappears from the narrative - he's last seen early in the penultimate episode after having been shot in the leg, and - unless I blinked and missed it - he's never mentioned again. It's an odd paradox; The Invasion has too much going on to fully complete all characters' subplots, yet there is only six episodes worth of story here stretched to fill eight. On VHS, as mentioned above, it was reduced to a six episode story; annoyingly, the missing two episodes are from early on when the plot's put together fine. It's in the latter half that it falls apart. The ending is structured oddly, with the climax of the fight against Cybermen in the IE factory, including main villain Tobias Vaughn's death, happening too early. There's then a lengthy sequence of characters standing around waiting to hear about whether a missile has destroyed the Cybermen's ship in orbit. The sequences should have been swapped around, or - better - the missile could have been dispensed with altogether. The Doctor and Vaughn have a device that emits a Cyberman-destroying signal, plus a big transmitter to beam that signal into space; it would make more sense for that to be the mechanism that saves the day.

There's a lot of good stuff in here too, even later on: for example, the famous sequence of the hypnotic signal taking people over across London, and the Cybermen then emerging from manholes and strutting about near St. Paul's Cathedral. The special sound created for that signal and for other sequences like the revivification of dormant Cybermen is perfect, as is Don Harper's score. Little touches too, such as the repetition of Packer being summoned and appearing on a monitor, only for this to be twisted: the final time Vaughn calls for Packer, the scary blank face of a Cyberman appears on the monitor instead. This design of the Cybermen is probably the best of the 1960s, and the decision to hold them back for the first half of the story is a good one. The character of Vaughn is a joy to watch. Kevin Stoney creates a silky smooth psychopath, with occasional flashes of hysteria and anger. The way he says Packer's name is so fun, and so easy to imitate. Many a villainous character in Doctor Who's history has tried to ally themselves with the Cybermen, thinking they can turn the tables on them; Vaughn comes closest to pulling it off, with only Professor Watkins dragging his heels meaning Vaughn runs out of time to mass produce a machine to kill Cybermen (I was almost rooting for him to succeed). Though not a part of the original presentation, of course, it's worth noting that the two animated episodes are gorgeous, the art in character designs and backgrounds is probably the best ever created for a Doctor Who missing episode animation project. I had a slight twinge of disappointment both times the story returned to live action.

Connectivity:

The Invasion and Lux both feature the antagonists using entertainment technology to assist them in invading Earth: Lux uses movie projection equipment to corporealise, the Cybermen and their ally Tobias Vaughn use circuits in products like Jamie's transistor radio to send a hypnotising signal, quelling any resistance from the population. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Animated Meanderings. The Invasion started something by creating UNIT in 1968, and then started something again in 2007 - it was the inaugural story using animation to represent episodes that were missing from the story (because they were missing from the archives). As mentioned in the First Time Round section above, Doctor Who initially made do with brief linking synopses delivered by actors from the original story, specially filmed many years later. Sometimes these were in character, sometimes not. Occasionally, things got a bit more sophisticated with surviving audio recordings and off-screen photographs put together to form reconstructions of missing episodes (as happened for The Ice Warriors and The Tenth Planet) but often they fell back on that original approach of brief linking material (The Crusade, The Reign of Terror) even to the very end of the VHS range. These approaches were also only felt to be viable to replace two episodes of a story maximum, and usually only if the surviving episodes outnumbered the reconstructed / summarised ones. The Crusade VHS release in 1999, with the story split 50/50 between two surviving and two missing episodes was the only exception - this was because an episode of the story had been recently discovered, so half the story was felt to be enough of a draw (even then, though, it was released in a box set with the adjacent complete story The Space Museum). After the UK animation company Cosgrove Hall Studios (who had produced Doctor Who webcast Scream of the Shalka) created animated episodes one and four of The Invasion for its DVD release, the sky was the limit. Animated visuals of missing episodes matched to those surviving soundtracks were much more watchable than a reconstruction, and much more faithful than an actor's brief summary.

Though more possibilities had been opened up, with even the potential for a wholly missing story being released in 100% animated form one day, what happened next for the DVD range and animations was... nothing, for a good long while. There were still plenty of intact adventures to release, and it was six more years before another story had episodes animated, by which time Cosgrove Hall had alas closed down. There were other companies, though. In 2013, either because the range was running out of other classic series stories to release, or because the costs of animating episodes had become more affordable, or both, three stories came out: The Reign of Terror (two episodes animated) in January, The Ice Warriors (two episodes animated) in August, and The Tenth Planet (one episode animated) in October. With its recovered episode old news by 2013, The Crusade did not get similar treatment (it has loads of different characters and locales too, which would make the animation a challenge), but a different 50/50 story was done instead. In early 2014, The Moonbase was released on its own shiny disc. Parts one and three were animated, parts two and four live action. It was the first story that animation allowed to have a release on DVD that had not been a title on VHS. To date, thirteen stories have had their own moment on DVD or Blu-Ray that never got to be centre stage in the video tape days; for only one of these - The Enemy of the World - was this wholly down to the live action episodes being recovered. The remainder have had some or all of their episodes animated for release on disc. Nearly three years on from The Moonbase, The Power of the Daleks was the first wholly missing animated story; a couple of years later, it was followed by The Macra Terror.

By the 2020s, two different teams (one led creatively by Gary Russell, the other by AnneMarie Walsh) were working away, with The Faceless Ones, Fury from the Deep, Galaxy 4, The Evil of the Daleks and The Abominable Snowmen being released between 2020 and 2022. Many of these included episodes that had been animated even though they existed in the archives, to allow the cartoon version to be watched as one consistent piece. Animating episodes you didn't 'need' to would have seemed the height of extravagance even a short few years earlier. Beyond the five new stories released in that period, there was also an improved version of Power of the Daleks, and a new version of The Web of Fear with its single missing episode (part 3) animated; the initial vanilla DVD edition had used a reconstruction. By the end of 2022, a source of funding from BBC America had dried up and there was a worry that the animations would go on hiatus. This situation didn't last long, though. Towards the end of 2023, The Underwater Menace was released; in 2024, there was The Celestial Toymaker, and in 2025, The Savages. Those of us who've been collecting home video Doctor Who since the VHS days can only boggle at the things that have been achieved that we wouldn't have thought of as feasible back then. To pick just a couple of examples, there are now only three - three! - Patrick Troughton stories left to be released (his era amounted to a pitiful handful of video tapes); and - bar a five-minute introduction at the end of an adventure where she was otherwise not present, every moment of companion Dodo's time with the Doctor (from The Ark to The War Machines) is available to buy on individual shiny discs.

There now remain only nine stories that haven't had a dedicated disc release. One of these is the longest story (The Daleks' Master Plan at 12 episodes) but one is the shortest (single episode prologue to Master Plan, Mission to the Unknown), so it evens out. Of the remaining stories, most are historical stories (Marco Polo, The Myth Makers, The Massacre, The Smugglers, The Highlanders), which might be more challenging to animate, and might be a harder sell. The other two (The Wheel in Space, The Space Pirates) are science fiction tales with metallic monsters and / or spaceships, so might be an easier proposition. Additionally, The Crusade  - which had 50% of its running time represented by reconstructions for its Blu-ray release alongside the rest of the second classic season - may be animated before the end. If two teams continue working at the established rate, and with technological advances still gathering pace in parallel that could be brought to bear, all these stories could be out in as little as five years. Exciting. 

In Summary:

Massively successful as a reusable formula, slightly less successful as a story in its own right (mostly because it's a couple of episodes too long). 

Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children

Chapter the 325th, in which the Doctor fought the lore, and the lore won.

Plot:

The far future; an intergalactic war rages between humans and Cybermen. Ko Sharmus is one of a resistance group that sends the Cyberium (wibbly energy glob that is the Cyber's battle AI and database) back in time, where it ends up at Villa Diodati. Semi-Cybernised zealot Ashad returns from the past having recovered the Cyberium. He and the remaining Cybermen hunt the few remaining humans. Ko Sharmus stations himself on a planet on which there's a portal to far off worlds, and helps humans to escape. Two time travellers, the Doctor and Ryan, accompanied by a surviving human, arrive at the planet. Ko Sharmus shows them the portal, but it's now continuously linked to the planet Gallifrey. The Master emerges and takes the Doctor back through. A Cyber ship arrives, and Cybermen attack. The three left on the planet defend themselves, and are saved by some Cybermen who turn out to be two more time travellers, Yaz and Graham, and two other surviving humans, disguised in Cyber suits. All seven walk through the barrier to Gallifrey to find the Doctor. The Cybermen also travel there in their ship. The Master shrinks Ashad with his Tissue Compression Eliminator, and takes the Cyberium. Sharmus and Co blow up the Cyber ship. The Master uses dead bodies of Time Lords to create a new group of Cybermen with the ability to regenerate: the Cyber-Masters. The Doctor finds the miniaturised Ashad; there is a superweapon still inside Ashad's Cyber suit that will destroy the Cyber-Masters. The Doctor takes it and confronts the Master, after having put everyone else in a TARDIS back to 21st century Earth. Ko Sharmus doesn't go with the others, and follows the Doctor. When she cannot bring herself to use the superweapon, he takes it from her and sacrifices himself. She just manages to escape before everything blows up. Suddenly, Judoon appear, arrest her and imprison her.

Parallel to this, there is the incongruous tale of Brendan, who lives in rural Ireland in the 20th century; he joins the police, miraculously survives a fall, retires many years later, and then has his memories wiped by some sort of electro-convulsion therapy machine. The Master had previously plugged the Doctor into the Matrix on Gallifrey and set off on some lengthy, lengthy exposition: the Doctor was a foundling taken in by Tecteun, a Gallifreyan; by chance, Tecteun discovered that her adopted child had the ability to regenerate, and extracted the genetic material controlling this, putting it into generations of Gallifreyans, who then became Time Lords. Brendan's story is part of the Doctor's history that has been wiped from her memory, adjusted in the matrix with a Ballykissangel filter.

Context:

There are very few stories left to blog now; I'm eking the last few out to allow for some to be shuffled in amongst the stories from Ncuti Gatwa's second run (still a couple of weeks away at the time of writing). The randomiser picked this story next, the most recently aired of those remaining, leaving only one other story to blog after this from the first phase of the new series from 2005 to 2022. I watched it from the iplayer over a couple of nights in March 2025. Slipback (a story from the mid-1980s) was still fresh in my mind, which was handy as I saw some parallels (more on this in the Reaction section below).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era; Jodie Whittaker's thirteenth Doctor joins the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors, making ten completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season, the 36th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

Jodie Whittaker's second run, the 12th series after the relaunch of Doctor Who in 2005, aired each Sunday from the beginning of 2020. Its two part finale was broadcast on the 23rd February and the 1st March 2020, and I watched them both live accompanied by all the family. In between, on leap day, Saturday 29th February, I was at the BFI watching the animated version of The Faceless Ones (as blogged about in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post. Perhaps because the revelations hadn't yet come (all that was in the second part), I don't remember much discussion that day of the story currently being broadcast on the telly.

Reaction:

When he got the job as Doctor Who showrunner, I commented here that it wouldn't be too long before online wags highlighted Chris Chibnall's past appearance on a BBC TV programme, where he criticised mid-1980s Doctor Who, as an example of long-term karma. In this final blog post for a story from his tenure, I'm going to have to hark back to that. In 1986, Chibnall was one of a number of teenage fans on Open Air, a discussion programme about other BBC programmes; he couldn't know that many years later he'd be on the receiving end of similar criticism, so dished it out without compunction. I don't reference it to snipe, just to point out that - however critical he might have been of it - mid-1980s Who had clearly made a formative impression. I can't think of any other reason why so many years later, he wrote an Eric Saward script as the two-part finale of his second series in charge. Let's look at some of the evidence from Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (which is a long-winded title that I'm tempted to abbreviate to just 'Ass'): a Doctor who doesn't drive the narrative, but is buffeted by overly bleak and violent action? Check. A mercenary character who is a more effective presence than the Doctor, in whom the writer seems much more interested than the nominal star of the show? Check. An unhealthy obsession with Time Lords and Cybermen? Check. It's like we've been pulled through a portal to another time and place. Just like Saward giving all the best lines in Revelation of the Daleks to his own character Orcini, so Chibnall allows Ko Sharmus to do all the fun stuff. Even minor points are similar: when Cybermen attack near the start, the fam get split up because they can't make it back to the TARDIS. Parking far away from the main action is something done in many a Saward story, including Revelation; at least Chibnall didn't have the Doctor spend the whole first episode walking to where all the other characters were.

There's a scene early on where the Doctor arrives with the fam with lots of gadgets to help the humans defend themselves against the Cybermen. All the devices are set up, named, discussed, and it sounds jolly impressive; then, they're blown up in an instant. The intention is clearly to up the ante by making the situation seem bleak, but that only works if the protagonist overcomes the bigger obstacles later; unfortunately, Jodie Whittaker's Doctor doesn't do this, as she's whisked off by the Master to her own subplot before she can do anything more in the Cyberman plot. Ko Sharmus, though, gets a very similar scene in the second episode but all his hardware is effective. It's not a one-off, either: the Doctor boasts about her ability to hotwire spaceships, but then some rando human can do it better than her. I found myself inwardly screaming 'It's her show, give her a win!' the longer things went on. There's nothing much that the Doctor gets to do other than receive information (this is harder to see on first watch as the surprise revelations about the Doctor's hitherto unknown past make it seem significant, but it's still exposition not plot). The only actual act that the Doctor does that's effective is using the power of her memories to break out of the Master's prison (a nice scene with lots of archive clips). The ending, though, has Ko Sharmus sacrificing himself to save the day, and the Doctor letting him do so with not much more than a shrug. This sort of scene is not unique to Doctor Who; the Doctor needs to survive to the next episode, so often someone else has to do the dirty work. The Doctor usually (and heroically) fights against this: the problem here is that the script and direction don't put her under sufficient pressure to make a decision, or have it made for her: Ko Sharmus needs to knock her out or lock her out of the room, or something along those lines.

The Doctor not being an active protagonist is far from the only problem; the surviving humans - only seven of them (who at first are presented as the only humans left, which later turns out not to be the case, an unnecessary extra confusion) - are a dull and featureless lot who don't speak like anyone you might have met. The script is also a bit contradictory about them: dialogue suggests that they are still very linked to their old lives ("We've got a childminder, a driver, a builder") but they are still able to act like expert soldiers, spies or saboteurs when the need arises. Additionally, a character who's presented as an older teenager confirms that he's been fighting Cybermen since he was four years old. Given the destruction this war is shown to have wreaked, is it feasible that people would still be as connected with their old lives after more than a decade, or indeed that there would be any civilisation left at all? Ashad's a dull villain with a tendency towards portentous speechifying; with the Doctor sidelined and the too many companions not having enough between them to do, this leaves only the Master. It's a great performance by Sacha Dhawan despite his character's motivation being hard to understand. Ian McElhinney as Ko Sharmus is solid too. There are some great visuals, but they often seem sterile (the beginning sequence with a cyber head floating towards the screen) or not aligned with the central premise (how is there still a big spaceship full of lots of dormant Cybermen, if they've been all but defeated?).

The most successful moments are those set in Ireland. The disconcertingly out of context interruptions depicting the life of the mysterious Brendan intrigue the audience precisely because they are disconcerting and out of context. It's almost a shame when they are explained as visions the Master has beamed into the Doctor's head (particularly as there's none of the traditional TV grammar that would normally be applied if a character was having visions - sometimes the Brendan cutaways happen when the Doctor isn't even on screen - so it feels like a cheat). The most controversial aspect of this story, the revelation of the Doctor's Timeless Child backstory, also works well. Many people dislike such a massive realignment of Doctor Who mythology, but it's clever and engaging, and is something that can be built on in future stories (as it was in Chibnall's Flux or in Russell T Davies' early Ncuti stories) without overwhelming the show. It has to be seen as something of a triumph in a nearly 60-year old show, to find a new take on the main character that was surprising but nonetheless broadly consistent with what had gone before. More analysis of this aspect of this story can be found in the Deeper Thoughts section of a blog post from close to the original transmission. It's just a shame that the delivery mechanism of these revelations is a fairly flat Cyberman versus humans story. 

Connectivity:

Both Slipback and Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children see the Doctor on a spaceship, and both stories feature aggressive law enforcement officers. In both stories, the Doctor is passive, not driving the story forward much or at all, with another Time Lord appearing partway through to explain things to them. The resolution sees a character other than the Doctor blow themselves up to save the day.

 

Deeper Thoughts:

Hand in hand through our... Arc life! Series and serials: Doctor Who fans who obsess over the details of its production and history (so, pretty much all of us) hear these terms all the time, but maybe don't think about them too much. When Doctor Who was first developed in 1963, there was a big difference between series (ongoing weekly adventures of a set of characters, plus new guest cast, that were one and done every week) and serials (bounded stories with mostly the same characters told over multiple weeks, with each episode forming only a part of an overall narrative that comes to a definite conclusion in the final episode). If there are antecedents, I'm not aware of them, so I think Doctor Who was the first, the mold-breaker, to be shaped as a series of serials. The challenges that the Doctor faces are not completed in a single episode, they take four or six or seven weeks, and the guest characters - and writer and director - stay more or less the same in that time; but then, once that challenge is resolved and a story comes to a firm conclusion, the fun doesn't end and there's a new story, new guest cast and different people involved behind the camera, following over multiple weeks. It's a very unusual approach; the televisual orthodoxy - particularly of that time in the 20th century - would dictate that if one is going to sacrifice the appeal of anyone being able to drop in at any particular point to engage with a clean slate, then it should only be for a short run; if one misses the first episode of a serial, then one is free to make a decision to watch something else for a few weeks, and then when another serial comes along it will be completely new with no baggage. With Doctor Who, there would be an unknown number of weeks before the next jumping-on point, and there would be at least some continuity between the serials.

This is probably why not many shows since have adopted the same format, and those that did - Sapphire and Steel, Timeslip, The Tomorrow People - were fantasy shows consciously modelling themselves on Doctor Who to a lesser or greater extent. What's curious, though, is that it worked: Doctor Who was a hit from that first series onwards, and in its 20th century run nobody considered changing the format. In the 1960s, production teams leant into it even more: there would be cliffhangers in between the serials too, making it one long adventure - singular - in space and time. One thing that probably helped it work is that the arcing narrative (that baggage that I mentioned earlier) was kept to a minimum: the Doctor was trying to get the two schoolteachers Ian and Barbara back home. That was it. Once those characters left, there was no arc plot at all, just a shared set of characters between the serials, and usually a cliffhanger to lead in to the next one. When Doctor Who was made in colour for the first time in the 1970s, the show was on for fewer weeks of the year, and those lead-in cliffhangers disappeared. For the rest of Jon Pertwee's years, the serials were not directly interlinked. A bit of arc plot came back in at this stage: mainly based on character dynamics (Jo Grant's growth as a person, Mike Yates's allying with the bad guys and the aftermath of that). This was the first time in Who's history when the final story of a run became a season finale, tying up some of those characters' plots, but it was still fairly loose. When Tom Baker took over, the new producer and script editor who came in with him got rid of even that. The last story of any particular run was usually the six-parter of that year, but the stories could have been shuffled into any order, and it wouldn't have made any difference.

A couple of times in the 1970s and 80s, the series experimented with linking all the stories under an umbrella theme - a quest to find the six pieces of the key to time, the Doctor on trial; but the last stories of those runs were the only other season finales of 20th century Who. It was probably a good decision; a year after the key to time season, a strike meant that the final story of the run, Shada, was not completed. With the potential disruption of industrial action always present (it killed off a story again in 1983), it was wise not to saddle any one serial with tying up a long-running narrative, just in case it never made it to screens. As the classic series of Doctor Who came to an end in the late 1980s, a pilot for a TV series being made in America was going to change the nature of things. David Lynch's Twin Peaks was influential in setting up a new standard: the detectives would not solve the murder at the show's heart in one week, the same investigation would continue the following week, and thereafter. Lynch, in his art school terrorist way, never wanted the case to get solved ever, but the network (and to a large extent the viewers too) disagreed. Since that experiment, the default has been established that one has to have a significant pay-off -  even if it isn't revealing everything - at the end of every season. It's more unusual for TV detectives to get a new case every week now than it is for them to get a new one every year. Series and serials have essentially become the same. Fantasy series have a bit more variety: the X-Files (probably the first major SF show to be influenced by Twin Peaks) was still in the story of the week mode, but with significant season or multi-season arcs. At the other end of the scale, Lost (whose creators have cited Twin Peaks as a significant influence) had minimal pay-offs from one year to the next, and frustrated many viewers.

When Doctor Who returned (an event celebrating its 20 year anniversary as I write this) it followed the X-files approach via Buffy. It was mostly single stories (though there were 2-parters in the mix too, as Doctor Who was felt to require cliffhangers) but with season-long arc plots, based both on developing character dynamics and also fantasy elements (usually a build up to the Big Bad confrontation in the season finale). Sometimes, showrunners planned their arcs over multiple years: Chris Chibnall sneaks in a reference to the Timeless Child within Jodie Whittaker's second story, long before it would be fully explained. Even to this day, though, there are still some echoes of Doctor Who's 20th century approaches too. The newly announced (at time of writing) episode titles, and writer and director credits, for Ncuti Gatwa's second season seem to confirm that its shape will be the same as the season in 2024: most stories the same length, but with one longer story at the end, just like Tom Baker used to do it. Pre-publicity has also suggested that the Doctor's aim throughout the run will be to get his new companion back home, just like he was trying to do with Ian and Barbara more than six decades earlier. Plus ça change...

In Summary:

The game changing exposition is actually quite interesting, and a neat idea, but it's surrounded by a bunch of ass -cension of the Cybermen.

Dark Water / Death in Heaven

Chapter the 319th, where the afterlife attacks!

Plot:

Danny Pink dies in an accident. A grieving Clara tries to force the Doctor to go back and change time to save him. Instead, the Doctor connects her to the TARDIS telepathic circuits to materialise the ship in the most likely place to find Danny again. This is the 3W Institute, run by Missy and reportedly set up by a founder that discovered that the dead can talk to us through television static, and they are all somehow still connected to their corpses. The Doctor thinks this is all a con to prey on people's fears. The rich people's minds are uploaded to a floating hard drive, which the Doctor recognises as Time Lord tech, while their bodies are kept in protective exoskeletons. Danny finds himself in what appears to be the afterlife, where an administrator called Seb greets him. Someone else there also wants to meet him: this is a boy that Danny accidentally killed when he was a soldier. Seb asks if Danny wants to use a service they provide where they can remove his painful emotions. Too late, the Doctor realises that the 3W exoskeletons are Cybermen, and that Missy is a regenerated Master. The Cybermen emerge in the St. Paul's area, and they and the Doctor and Missy are surrounded by UNIT, led by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Osgood. The Cybermen fly up to the sky and explode, forming a cloud, and rain starts to fall. This rain contains 'Cyber pollen' which turns dead people into Cybermen. In the Institute, Clara bluffs some Cybermen that she is actually the Doctor to buy some time. A rogue Cyberman arrives and takes her away.

The Doctor, Missy and the TARDIS are put aboard a UNIT plane, but flying Cybermen attack it in the air. Missy kills Osgood. Kate falls from the plane. As if that's not bad enough, a UNIT character played by the wonderful and talented Sanjeev Bhaskar is criminally underused before he too is killed off. The Doctor skydives from the plane, catching up with and entering the falling TARDIS. He materialises near Clara in a graveyard where many Cybermen are coming to life. The rogue Cyberman turns out to be Danny Pink. Missy arrives and tells the Doctor that the Cyber-rain will fall again, converting all the living people. She offers the Cyber-army to the Doctor, thinking that his self-righteousness will make him accept and the power will corrupt him. The Doctor refuses, and passes the control bracelet for the Cybermen that Missy has given him to Danny. Danny leads the Cybermen to fly up and destroy the clouds. Missy is shot by another Cyberman that turns out to be a reanimated dead Brigadier, who had previously caught and saved Kate when she fell from the plane. The bracelet allows Danny to bring back to life the boy he killed, who arrives in Clara's home. The Doctor uses coordinates that Missy gave him hoping to find the missing Gallifrey, but there's nothing there. He visits Clara, and both of them lie thinking that they need to protect the other's happiness (the Doctor thinks Clara is reunited with Danny, she thinks he's been reunited with his people). She stays on Earth; in the TARDIS, the Doctor is surprised to find Santa Claus knocking on the door, telling him he can't leave things that way.

Context:

This was viewed from the BBC iplayer in mid-January 2025, the first and second episode separated by a couple of days. For the first episode I was accompanied by all the children (young man of 18, boy of 15, girl of 12). The eldest was home for the last day before returning to university, and he was only interested to see Chris Addison playing Seb in the story, as he's a big fan of The Thick of It. He was a little disappointed that Addison didn't share any scenes with Capaldi (the scenes in the aforementioned comedy where Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker and Addison's Olly Reader interact are many and celebrated). There was a surprising amount of enthusiasm from the younger two to keep going and watch the second part immediately after the cliffhanger, but I didn't have the time at that moment. When I did, their enthusiasm had waned and I watched the second part alone. 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era; Peter Capaldi's twelfth Doctor joining the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh and fourteenth, making seven Doctors completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season making it 33 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

Early November 2014, just over ten years before the recent rewatch, I saw these episodes when they were first broadcast on BBC1 in the UK. The pattern of the time was to timeshift each episode a little, watching it later on during the Saturday evening after it had gone out, accompanied by the Better Half. If we both thought an episode was suitable for the children, whose ages ranged from 2 to 8 years old at the time, I would watch it with them the following Sunday morning. Capaldi's first year had proved more scary than any season before, at least in our assessment, and three of its stories had been held back from the children; the two-part finale, though, was not one of those stories, despite some questionable moments that I'll pick up on in the Reaction section below.

Reaction:

In a scene in Dark Water, the 'three words', hinted about in the name of the institute around which a lot of the action revolves, are revealed. The words are 'Don't cremate me' and they are cried out in anguish by the supposed voices of the dead picked up from the ether. It's played realistically, and is therefore quite a chilling scene. I could see how another parent or child would react differently to how my children and I did on first watch. The Doctor has some dialogue to state that it's all a con, that there is no link between the corpses of the dead and any continuing spirit or soul; it's quick and easy to miss, though. Elsewhere, Danny Pink's spirit / soul is visually depicted. The script suggests - to those that can follow the technical bafflegab - that it's actually a computer simulation of him based on his memories; but the visual, scene after scene, is him walking around in an afterlife. This overpowers any technicalities: the story is weighted heavily - in some places, pretty much explicitly - towards a suggestion that people live on in some way after they die, in pain. There's multiple references to Danny's feeling cold, and this is stated to be because his corpse is still linked to him somehow, and it's being kept somewhere cold. That's quite an unsettling thing to suggest to younger members of the audience, and the programme fumbles the scientific explanation that may provide reassurance. Danny Pink, dead or alive, is never shown to be connected to any futuristic computer or such. He just magically appears in what is presented as an afterlife, but is actually - we find out later - some form of cyberspace. In the first episode, the Doctor says "We're here to get your boyfriend back from the dead", so he must believe it is possible in some way (though he has no knowledge of the use of the nethersphere tech at that point).

Why do the minds that have been uploaded to the nethersphere need to have a virtual afterlife to exist in, anyway? If all they are planned to be is the consciousness of an army of Cybermen, then can't they be put on standby until they're required to rampage? Would Missy really need anyone's consent to remove their emotions? She has a computer that stores dead people's brains, she can edit them to her two hearts' content. Why would she need to provide afterlife aftercare, and subtle manipulation, in the form of Seb? It makes sense that Missy is amassing an army of Cybermen by using fear to drum up trade for the 3W Institute. It makes sense that a rich punter might arrange before they die for their brain to be uploaded into her nethersphere, and their body to be put in a Cyber-suit / exoskeleton, based on their fear of the three words con. It doesn't make sense, though, that elsewhere Missy's shown as perfectly able to upload anyone to the nethersphere, whether they've engaged the Institute or not. it doesn't really make sense that loads of bodies in graves are converted into Cybermen by magic rain. The 'Cyber pollen' could contain the instructions for creating a new Cyberman, but where's it getting the raw materials? This is science an order of magnitude more advanced than that seen in the 3W Institute, which makes a mockery of the idea that Missy needed all those old, rich millionaires' money to fund her research. With only the slightest thought, it becomes clear that the story doesn't need the Institute front at all. It could be one episode long and start with Missy using some Gallifreyan tech to make people rise up out of their graves. The Cybermen reanimating dead bodies is, after all, a great idea, and enough to sustain a story on its own.

Without the nethersphere stuff, we would lose the subplot about Danny Pink's death, and that allows for some emotionally rich material. The sequence of Clara threatening the Doctor, urging him to go back and change time to save Danny, is one of the best of this period: it involves wonderful performances and great visuals, playing out near an active volcano; it has a great reversal, and ends with the killer line of the Doctor's "Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?" The story also wouldn't have its ending. Putting aside the monumental silliness that Missy has done this whole convoluted global plan just to make a rhetorical point about the Doctor's capacity to become a dictator, the scenes where Danny's humanity and love for Clara overrides Cyber programming and he saves the day are very satisfying. The Doctor realising that he himself is not a bad man, just an "idiot" trying to make things better does tie together the themes of the season as a whole (just about). In the slightly overlong coda, though, all the earlier issues with Doctor Who establishing an essentially real in-universe afterlife are brought back again. The bracelet that Missy's used to travel back and forth to the cyberspace realm allows someone who has been dead to come back to life. But Missy had a living body when she used the bracelet. When the boy is brought back at the end, where's his body come from? Only his dead mind was in the nethersphere, and he's been dead a long time. Also, how's Clara going to track down his parents, and how on Earth are they going to react? Worse than all that, though, is the implicit endorsement of the earlier idea that if you cremate your loved ones they can feel it. It's grim, as well as confusing. Sometimes fewer ideas work better.

If one can manage to switch one's brain off, though, the story is very enjoyable. There are some great action scenes like the Cybermen recreating the classic scene of them stomping around near St. Paul's Cathedral, then surprising everyone watching by zooming into the sky, newly able to fly. The reveal of Michelle Gomez's Missy as a regenerated Master is lots of fun, and her manic, murderous scenes throughout work well. Poor Osgood is given hope in the middle of an episode by the Doctor that she can join him as a companion, which the savvy audience member will know is a surefire sign that she won't make it to the end credits. Jenna Coleman as Clara has some great material. The character shows wonderful chutzpah in playing for time with the Cybermen after the cliffhanger, pretending to be the Doctor. The decision to reverse the order of the names in the second episode's beginning title sequence and show Clara's eyes rather then the Doctor's takes it too far though, another example of a bad habit of writer and producer Steven Moffat's where he pretends there's a big twist when there isn't. The action, and some creepy horror scenes like Cyber hands emerging through the earth of graves, are well realised by director Rachel Talalay and it's no surprise watching this story that she was invited back to do every Capaldi season finale thereafter. She handles the emotional scenes well too, as in the moment at the end where the Doctor and Clara part with an awkward hug, both lying to the other about how well they are doing. Towards the end there's another moment that is of dubious taste. The beloved character of the Brigadier is brought back from the dead. Long term viewers are forced to imagine that Nicholas Courtney, who had died a few years before this story, is a corpse encased in one of Doctor Who's ultimate evil baddies. Even with the character, as with Danny Pink, overriding Cyber-programming and helping to save the day, it's still a bit icky. (But, then, what do I know? See the Deeper Thoughts section below for more musings on that theme.)

Connectivity:

Both Joy to the World and Dark Water / Death in Heaven are Steven Moffat penned Doctor Who stories that boldly (inadvisably?) touch on religious topics (the star of Bethlehem, the afterlife). Additionally, there's a lone Silurian working in the time hotel in the Christmas story, and it is established by later stories that the version of Osgood seen in Dark Water / Death in Heaven might be a disguised Zygon; so, both stories potentially feature friendly single members of classic series monsters with jobs. There's also a festive connection, with Santa Claus appearing in the very final moments of Death in Heaven, as a lead in to that year's Christmas special, Last Christmas, also written by Moffat.

Deeper Thoughts:

Going too far? A rant about Mary Whitehouse. Dark Water / Death in Heaven has one or maybe two moments that in my opinion went too far; that is to say, they went beyond my own personal perception of what is acceptable for a family audience. As mentioned above, I nonetheless thought it would be okay for my young children to view it. When their impressionable young minds first engaged with the material, they immediately started imitating what they saw, setting up their own company to facilitate an alien invasion by preying on people's fears about death. No, of course they didn't, and yes I'm being flippant and glib. An underlying point remains, though: what standards of acceptability do we apply to TV drama, and who am I - who is anyone? - to enforce them for anyone except themself (or perhaps for their kids, if they have parental responsibility). Everyone - adult or child - is different. It seems very presumptuous to speak for a wider audience even just about the qualities of a particular piece; to go beyond that and try to dictate what can or can't be shown, or who can or can't see it, takes that presumption and compounds it. Some people have no qualms with taking presumption and raising it to a higher power. One such person, who many a Doctor Who fan knows too well, was Mary Whitehouse. Whitehouse was a political lobbyist in the UK who focussed on media standards related to obscenity and the depiction of violence. She was active from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, and during that time Doctor Who occasionally became the subject of her activism (because of depictions of violence, not - as far as I'm aware - anything related to hanky-panky in the TARDIS). The most high profile Who-related incident was her complaint about the cliffhanger ending to The Deadly Assassin's third episode, where she succeeded in getting the BBC to re-edit the sequence for future repeats.

I will reiterate my description of Whitehouse as a lobbyist and activist; that was what she was. She was not an ordinary member of the viewing public just doing her small bit out of a feeling of duty. Many people might have thought it was useful to style her as such, but it was patently not true. She called her organisation the National Viewers and Listeners Association, but it was not representative of the average viewer or listener of the nation - she no doubt spoke for some people, but they were a special interest group with views that could be described as extreme. And she was very successful. If one is tempted to see that as a positive thing, one should ask oneself whether there are any other successful lobbyists one feels good enough about to champion. As a calling, lobbyism is not one that is usually acclaimed; but, maybe - as is said of dirty work - somebody has to do it. Whitehouse played a significant part in the creation of a couple of pieces of UK legislation that most people would find unquestionably good, the Protection of Children Act 1977 and the Indecent Displays Act of 1981. She also believed that homosexuality was a perversion, and used legal processes to persecute individuals. The most egregious example of the latter was the case that she instigated concerning a play put on at the National Theatre, The Romans in Britain. The play included a scene of a simulated male-on-male rape, which Whitehouse took objection to (after it had been reported to her - she never saw the play, indeed she refused to ever see it). When they could not make a case for this being an obscenity, Whitehouse and her counsel brought private prosecution against the play's director Michael Bogdanov based on an offence under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, based on what was shown on stage amounting to his "procuring an act of gross indecency".

This case is covered well by a BBC radio documentary called 'Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse' first broadcast in 2022 that is still available in the UK at the time of writing, on the BBC Sounds app. It was produced by Simon and Thomas Guerrier (Simon blogs about it here) who have both worked on many Doctor Who projects of different kinds over the years. Linked from that blog post is another blog post by another Doctor Who commentator Jonathan Morris, reproducing the text of an article he wrote for Doctor Who Magazine in 2003. I remember encountering both when they first were available, and bristling that both seemed to be attempting to rehabilitate Whitehouse's reputation with Doctor Who fans. Perhaps aptly, or perhaps ironically, this offended my moral sensibilities. Whitehouse put Michael Bogdanov through hell just for directing a play that she didn't like. Whitehouse's counsel gave up the prosecution after three days of the trial, and she ended up liable for Bogdanov's legal costs. Whitehouse spun this as being done as a kindness, not having wanted to criminalise him at all, just wanting to establish that the Sexual Offences act applied to the theatre. I don't believe that; I believe that the case was abandoned as they suspected they weren't going to win. I also don't think the behaviour towards Bogdanov was very Christian. I feel sure that Whitehouse believed it was Christian, though. She had embarked on a previous case against Gay News, who had offended Whitehouse by publishing a poem that she thought was blasphemous, because in her words "I simply had to protect our lord". To my mind, this is not a healthy or proportionate attitude for anyone to have.

In many years of study, nobody has ever demonstrated conclusively that violent or sexual media content influences long-term behaviour, and some people have really tried hard to make that stick. Of course, someone who's just been to their Gran's cremation might get triggered by Dark Water / Death in Heaven's scene of (fake) voices from a hellish afterlife, but you can't write drama - or define laws - based on not offending anyone no matter what's going on in their circumstances. My kids were young at the time I gauged the story's acceptability; some of them understood exactly what the ramifications of the voices scene were, meaning they were mature enough to handle it; some did not, and it sailed right over their heads. This is mostly how it works in my experience. Guerrier in his blog picks out a scene in The Crusade, which hints that characters may need to kill themselves to avoid a fate worse than death if they're caught; he believes it may be something that wouldn't be shown in a family drama today. There's nothing graphic or even spelt out in the scene, though, so I think it would self-correct in the same way; if you understand, you accept; if you don't, it won't disturb. Morris thinks that 1970s Who had only itself to blame for getting Whitehouse's attention, because it pushed at the boundaries of the BBC's guidelines of the time, and maybe overstepped the mark occasionally. But how else do guidelines ever adapt? Tom Baker stories look tame compared to TV now. Doctor Who is self-evidently not responsible for any criminally violent behaviour; violence is much more complex than that, and pretending otherwise is usually a sign of a hidden agenda (like the promoting of a radically conservative interpretation of Christianity, for example).

Mary Whitehouse's crusading zeal undermined itself. Her low threshold for offence meant that she searched everywhere for obscenity and found it. This made her definition of the obscene so broad and indiscriminate that she bracketed together homosexuals with paedophiles, Doctor Who cliffhangers with porno mags in newsagents. This was shameful, and undoubtedly harmful. The poisonous legacy of that overshadows any potential good she may have contributed along the way, its radioactive half life so long that I feel any attempt at rehabilitating her should not be happening now, or at any point during my lifetime. There's also a hollow irony in Whitehouse's association with John Smyth. He was the lawyer that had worked with her on a number of cases, including initially on The Romans in Britain prosecution. The late Smyth, who died in 2018, was the serial abuser of children central to the former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby's decision to resign his position towards the end of 2024 (Welby accepted that he had not done enough to ensure that the details of the abuse were communicated widely enough, and appropriate action taken, when he first became aware of the situation in 2013). Whitehouse saw threats to children everywhere except in someone close to her. The radio documentary speculates that, had she found out during her lifetime, it might have fundamentally changed her outlook. I don't think I can find enough charity in my heart to agree, but here's a thought: rather than my getting angry or offended about a piece of media I don't agree with, or trying to supress it, why don't I instead encourage you to listen to it? You could also read the blog posts linked above. Then, make up your own mind. That isn't so hard, is it?!!

In Summary:

If you can switch off your brain, and your sense of decorum, its a fun and emotional season finale.