Doctor Who (The TV Movie) - 4K restoration

Chapter the 348th, 30 years on, he's still back and it's still about time.

Plot:

The Daleks exterminate the Master (nobody knows why); his dying wish is that the Doctor should escort his remains to Gallifrey, and the Daleks agree to this (nobody knows why). It's a trick though, as the Master has survived as a globular snake-form (nobody knows how). The snake-form attacks the TARDIS, forcing a materialisation in San Fran Vancouver on 31st December 1999 (which used to be the future). On leaving the TARDIS, the Doctor is hit during a street gang shoot-out. A gang member Chang Lee accompanies him to the hospital in an ambulance with paramedic Bruce, but the snake-form Master has also hitched a ride. Because of the Doctor's binary vascular system, the surgeon on call Grace is confused and kills him. In the morgue afterwards, a delayed regeneration kicks in, and a new Doctor emerges. The snake-form meanwhile takes over Bruce's body. The Doctor wanders around a disused wing of the hospital suffering from amnesia, changes his clothes, and then finds Grace. She's quit her job at the hospital because the management are covering up that they treated an alien. The Master meets up with Chang Lee and persuades the boy to help him steal the Doctor's life force. The TARDIS power source, the Eye of Harmony, will help with this plan; when the Master opens it, the Doctor regains his memory. Its power becomes a threat to the world, which will be destroyed at exactly midnight. That's midnight Pacific Daylight Time, presumably. Anyway, there's then a chase, a MacGuffin (the Doctor needs to get a chip from an atomic clock to fix the TARDIS) and a big confrontation. The Doctor saves the world, leaves Grace and Chang Lee, and goes back to adventuring in the TARDIS. To be continued... actually, no, not to be continued, alas.

Context:

This may seem like cheating, as I have already blogged about this one, but I ran out of Doctor Who stories to blog last year and at the time of writing I'm still living through a long gap before they show any more. As a 'wilderness years' style break from creating and posting chronological indexes of my random musings for each Doctor - like the Paul McGann starring feature-length story, this blog post is positioned in between the classic and the new series Doctors - I decided to revisit the Doctor Who TV movie. Its 4K restoration, which I was lucky enough to get a ticket to see at its BFI screening in May 2026, anyway makes it seem like something new. In fact, as we in the audience were told at that screening, it was something new, even something unique - the BFI version was specially made so it could be shown at 24 frames per second (as is standard for movies) rather than the 23.98 frames per second standard of Blu-ray. So - in the nerdiest way possible - we were very privileged that day. Insert joke here about how lucky we were to see a TV movie that was over slightly more quickly.

First Time Round:

See my first blog post on the TV movie from early on in the blog's life for my memories of this story from 1996. Casting my mind back again to those days, I see further evidence of a theme that I'll come back to in the Reaction section below: the TV movie could not possibly be wholly successful because it was trying to please too many different groups. Why, for example, was the sell-through VHS of the movie available in the UK before it was broadcast on television? This was simply because BBC Worldwide had put money into the production's budget, and they wanted to maximise sales before a mass audience got to see the story for free. If one were to set out to make a straight-to-video Doctor Who special, though, one would almost certainly go about it differently to how one would make a special aimed at a BBC1 primetime TV audience (a one-off TV movie aimed at a US audience would be approached differently still, and a pilot for a US TV series differently from that). The upshot for me was having to make a decision about how to experience the story first as a fan. In the 1980s, I had been an excited viewer of new Doctor Who as it aired, and I was eager to be one again (even if for one night only). In the 1990s, though, I had become a collector of Doctor Who as it came out on VHS, and the urge to continue this, with something excitingly new rather than an archive release, was strong. I squared the circle by purchasing the VHS as soon as it became available, but not watching it until after the broadcast. As a small commemoration of this (so small that it would go unnoticed if I didn't point it out); I published my blog post indexing Paul McGann's brief tenure on the 13th May 2026, exactly 30 years to the day after the VHS was originally scheduled to go on sale. And this post celebrating the TV movie's sprucing up has been published on the 27th May 2026, the 30th anniversary of the BBC TV screening.

Reaction:

There's not much I can say about the magnificent restoration that's been done to the TV movie: when viewed in the NFT1 auditorium at the BFI, it looked and sounded amazing. The TV movie always looked and sounded pretty good, though. The restoration can't do anything to fix the script. If the look of the piece is stunning, the narrative just leaves one feeling stunned. Writer Matthew Jacobs for years thought Doctor Who fandom disliked his contribution, but anyone in the know would not blame him: the root cause - as I touched on in the Context section above - is that Jacobs was servant to too many masters. It was too much of a challenge creating something that would appeal to both US and UK audiences (and the executives that represented them) with differing levels of knowledge about Doctor Who and its concepts. The TV movie is the transatlantic equivalent of a 'euro-pudding' movie; this is a term used to describe large-scale European co-productions, where concessions made to the multiple funding sources from different territories result in a homogenised mess. US productions don't suffer in this way as much, because pockets tend to be deeper, but money still needs to come from multiple sources and there still can be the curse of multiple and contradictory exec notes pulling the writer in too many directions. The budget for the production came from four places: Fox, Universal, BBC Worldwide and BBC Television. Much as a UK-based fan viewer might have bristled at too much of a US focus, only Fox had the power to greenlight a series. Producer Philip Segal should have concentrated on pleasing them, and cut - or at least not highlighted - links to the past history of the show. Anything might have happened in terms of the movie's ratings that would have meant there was no future funding from Fox, but at least the pilot would have been coherent.

Some of the truly damaging decisions can't even be blamed on distant execs, but were made by Segal trying to legitimise his story as part of the overall continuity of Doctor Who, pandering to his inner fan. This is not hindsight bias either; even at the time, I was far from alone in thinking that featuring Sylvester McCoy and a regeneration rather than starting with Paul McGann was a terrible idea. This wasn't something insisted on by the BBC (who believed McCoy's years on the original series were a failure), it was all Segal. Focussing on the Doctor's rebirth not only delays the introduction of the star and the main plot, but it also skews the story's focus toward the more esoteric elements of Who lore (regeneration, finite numbers of lives, eye of harmony energy, etc.) instead of something more immediate and accessible like an alien invasion. I was the epitome of devoted Doctor Who fan in 1996, and I didn't care about that stuff, so I'm struggling to think of anyone who would have. Rather than be annoyed at little errors (McCoy holding the sonic screwdriver facing the wrong way, McGann saying the wrong total number of lives a Time Lord has), I was annoyed at anyone thinking they mattered enough to apply clumsy fixes (a blur is applied to the screwdriver, McGann redubs the line). When it's not tying itself up in these knots, Jacobs's screenplay creates some good set pieces, nice lines and good jokes. The casting is perfect, the direction is dynamic. But nothing makes any sense from one moment to the next, and every time I watch, the mounting number of questions this creates in my mind overpowers my viewing pleasure. I've seen the TV movie dozens of times over the years, but the questions keep coming. It's not just questions about Doctor Who continuity either. It can't be midnight everywhere in the world at the same time, can it?! That's just common sense.

Beyond issues with fictional continuity and real world logic, there are character issues. The kiss between Grace and the Doctor is one example. The controversy about the Doctor having a snog has been wildly overstated over the years; I don't remember it seeming too much out of place, even at the time. But Grace's reaction to it - asking the Doctor to kiss her again - doesn't sit well with her attitude before or after the kiss sequence, where she thinks the Doctor is a dangerously unstable individual. The inconsistency in her behaviour throughout regarding how much she believes the Doctor, and how much evidence she's given that he's telling her the truth (a plate glass window goes all wibbly in front of her, that should be a clincher) undermines the moment where she finally picks a side and joins up with the Doctor. This is the sequence with the traffic cop ("Now, would you stand aside before I shoot myself"), which I think is the one truly magic moment of the story. Jacobs captures the essence of Doctor Who in that one scene, and it's magnificent to watch (as long as one forgets anything that came before and after). Every scene probably works better if viewed as a standalone that doesn't relate to any other; even then, though, a lot of the material is very derivative of other sources. It's like a 1990s greatest hits: the paramedic and hospital scenes are very ER, the cover up of alien activity is very X-Files (the skeptical Grace acts as the Scully of the TV movie), the look of the Master is very Terminator 2, the cloister room is straight out of a Batman movie (it definitely has more bats than it does cloisters - it's more of a belfry room). Collectively it becomes a little too much, but it probably made sense to help the uninitiated in the audience orient themselves towards Doctor Who as similar genre fare.

It reads like I'm criticising Jacobs too much, but to reiterate: I think he did the best possible job with the contradictory mission statement he was given, and the same goes for director Geoffrey Sax and the cast. Segal is the one to blame, but it's hard to blame him too much either: the Herculean effort he put in over many years to get this one movie created, and for it to have even the slimmest hope of leading to a series, was almost as much as holding back death and turning back time and all that jazz. It's 30 years in the past now, and Doctor returned to TV as a going concern just under a decade later, so the only tiny trace of blame that can be left is for making something that looks good but doesn't hang together as a narrative. And that's something that's not exactly rare in US television nor in Doctor Who. 

Connectivity:

Like The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, the TV movie 4K restoration features multiple actors playing the Doctor, one of whom is Sylvester McCoy. Both stories kind-of sort-of feature the Daleks: the comedy short directed by Peter Davison technically features only Dalek operators and props not fictional Daleks from Skaro; the TV Movie just has a voiceover for the offscreen metal meanies, provided seemingly by someone who's never heard a Dalek before.

Deeper Thoughts:

Walker General Hospital patient record for John Smith: the TV Movie at the BFI, 17th May 2026. Fan friends David and Scott, mentioned many times before on the blog, met me early on the Sunday morning of the screening. We took our seats in NFT1, the biggest screen at BFI Southbank. The programme was more packed than usual, and the event was even more like a mini-convention than ever, with a display of props in the building to view after the screening, as well as the usual signing stalls and Quiz of Rassilon event. The quality of the giveaways for the opening quiz was higher than usual, including some exclusive artwork and signed action figure sets. Regular hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy asked a number of people up to the stage to briefly explain what they'd provided: Al Dewar from toymaking company Character Options, Jonathan Wilkins from Titan Comics, and John McLay, the curator of a Doctor Who art exhibition. The quality of the prizes entailed the questions being somewhat more challenging than usual; does anyone out there know the address of the Institute where the Doctor gets the atomic clock chip (nobody did in the audience at the BFI)? Eventually, they dispensed with questions altogether and gave a prize to someone occupying a random seat number, K10 (as K9 would have been too obvious). A couple of prizes were given to those who'd travelled furthest to be at the screening; these were two American gentlemen, one from Boston, one from Virginia ("Don't give them the Blu-rays" said Johnson to Fiddy, who as usual was on duty delivering the winnings to people in the auditorium,"They might not work").

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Pontiff

Next was the traditional round-up of social media posts about the event. One of which was someone asking whether - if they high-fived everyone in the front row - they would get a prize? "Let's see, " said Johnson, after which the tweeter fulfilled his part of the bargain, and Johnson added "The answer's No". Dear reader, this was just joshing and the game fellow did indeed get a prize. All this took longer than usual, leaving not much time to talk to Reecy Pontiff, author of a book called Leap of Eighth, which sounds like a fascinating guide to Paul McGann's Doctor's extended universe appearances. After her brief interview on stage, there was a sweet video statement from Matthew Jacobs shown. In this, he described the TV movie as "a stepping stone through the wilderness years". Then the main feature played out. There wasn't much in terms of surprising audience reaction, though McCoy's scream during the Operating Room scene elicited a few titters (it ended up cut for the first UK transmission, because of concerns about being too scary rather than too risible). There was also a warm round of applause elicited by the final caption with the dedication to Jon Pertwee, who died a week before the movie was shown on UK TV screens in 1996. Before the first panel, there was time for one more single interviewee to come up for a brief chat. This was Doctor Who props enthusiast James Sutton, who showed off the TARDIS toolkit, sonic screwdriver, and an Eye of Harmony staff from the movie. He also wanted to make a statement about something that had bothered him for years: because the 70s prop replicated for the movie was never used consistently by Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker, Sylvester McCoy has been unfairly maligned for decades. There's no way he can be said to be holding the sonic screwdriver the wrong way round. "A huge relief to hear that," said Johnson archly.

Sutton with original sonic and toolkit bag props

The first panel featured four people who had worked on the restoration - David Palfreyman, who scanned the film reels (twice), colourist Darren Mostyn, Mark Ayres, responsible for sound remastering and mixing, and supervising producer and picture restorer Paul Vanezis. They briefly outlined the negotiations with Universal that lead to 219 film reels being delivered to the UK in October 2025. This was in the nick of time, as much of the celluloid is suffering from vinegar syndrome, and might not have been playable had it been left any longer. There then followed round-the-clock work for the small restoration team, or most of them at least. After a detailed description of the overtime put in by David and Paul, Mostyn said "I feel guilty now only doing 9 to 5!". Vanezis was asked about whether there was any new material found, but he explained that it was a fairly lean production, so there aren't any significant deleted or alternate scenes that haven't been seen before. Everything will be on the Blu-ray, anyway. One thing that will be slightly different is a moment where the broadcast had a flaw because of a scratched negative. This has now been fixed, because it "Takes half an hour to do, unlike in 1996". It was a panel that was heavy on the technical detail, and therefore a little dry, but it ended with an impassioned speech from Ayres about the quality of the production, and Geoffrey Sax's work in particular. To anyone who thought that the TV movie was not real Doctor Who his message was "It bloody well is". The panel was followed by what Johnson referred to only as the last piece of footage to be shown as part of the screening. I assumed it would be a compilation of extras from the Blu-ray as is usual, but instead it was The Night of the Doctor in full, and it was wonderful to see it on the big screen.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Palfreyman, Mostyn, Ayres, Vanezis

The final panel featured Geoffrey Sax and Paul McGann. Sax began by saying of the restored version he'd just watched that "It scrubs up very well." McGann hadn't sat through the whole thing, and was asked whether he watches himself onscreen, as some actors don't - "I'd rather not". He explained that it has got easier as the years go by. Because of the strong memories of doing the work, he finds watching things he's in more like watching "A film of a holiday rather than following the story". Both Sax and McGann talked about how they believed while working on the movie that they would later be coming back to Doctor Who as a series: "There was an atmosphere of 'we'll reconvene in six months'", "You know the odds, realistically, but you can't work in that spirit". Sax outlined the differences between working on a pilot compared to standalone or episodic pieces. He also talked about Jacobs's script saying that most of it worked, but there was a challenge to create the final Doctor Master confrontation as the script just stated "They fight in a cool and interesting way". McGann added that sex scenes are written like that. This led to a discussion of the kissing in the TV movie. "The K word!" It was pretty chaste, thought McGann, "No tongues or anything". It was pointed out that Eric Roberts's Master also kisses Grace, and that's a lot more full-on. "That's Eric, though, isn't it?!" said McGann. McGann was also surprised that even to this day no Doctor has given a companion a 'frenchie': "Not even Tennant, like?"

McGann comes to the stage to join Sax

Both gentlemen answered in an unequivocal affirmative when asked if they'd have accepted the same job on a production that was just funded by the BBC without US involvement. Though later McGann did speak about some hesitancy agreeing to sign up for Doctor Who back in the 1990s. Had it gone to series, it would have taken at least six years of his life, and would have meant a move to live in Canada for filming: "The Stakes were high... my kids would have been Canadians". In the end, his agent helped him to be comfortable enough to accept the role. This agent was Janet Fielding (who had played companion Tegan in Doctor Who in the 1980s). McGann hadn't even known she'd previously been an actor prior to the Doctor Who offer as it wasn't something she talked about, but she was able to tell him from experience that (as he quoted her) "It ain't going to be like other jobs ... you'll still be talking about it in 30 years' time". Indeed he was. This may be an exclusive, I can't remember hearing McGann talk about it before, or it may have been a joke, but McGann said he is convinced that Philip Segal could not tell him and his brother Mark apart, and that's why both of them were invited to audition for the Doctor role. Sax discussed the practicalities of filming in Vancouver in the cold of January and February 1996. The final goodbye scene of the movie was shot in heavy rain, which gave Grace actor Daphne Ashbrook's hair "a life of its own". Yee Jee Tso, playing Chang Lee, fell into the fountain during that shoot. McGann described Tso as having a Tigger-like energy. Despite its comparatively large budget compared to BBC-produced Doctor Who, the TV movie was still made with speed and economy, with a maximum of two takes for any shot, according to McGann. He acted out a typical exchange: "Could we go for another take? Was it in focus? Yes. No you can't."

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Sax, McGann 

What for me was the biggest exclusive of the day was Sax confirming that the Dalek voices heard at the beginning could have been worse. The post-production dubbing was done by a Canadian firm, The Loop Group, and none of them had ever heard a Dalek. So, what was originally recorded were some very polite Canadian voices chanting "Exterminate, Exterminate". Sax ended up having to voice the Daleks himself: "Some people like it, some people think it's absolutely terrible", "It's my Hitchcock moment... I'm also the chicken squawk". McGann talked a little about the making of The Night of the Doctor: it was shot in a day with writer Steven Moffat furiously rewriting as it was being made, handing McGann pieces of paper with new dialogue. He just had to lie to people (including the other Doctor actors when filming The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot) if asked whether he was returning for the 50th anniversary. It eventually did leak, so the release of the short was brought forward. It was supposed to be a red button extra on the anniversary day 23rd November 2013, but ended up released on McGann's birthday 14th November. Moffat texted McGann "Happy Birthday" when letting him know. McGann thought this worked out okay as instead of being lost in the anniversary hubbub, "It had a week to itself". The final question was Sax being asked whether he was ever asked to work on Doctor Who after its return in 2005. He had worked with people involved in post-2005 Who production before, and was indeed asked to direct a couple of times, but he had clashes on the dates involved. After that, he wasn't asked again. "They thought you were playing hard to get" said McGann. 

In Summary:

A transatlanti-pudding. But a very good-looking one.

Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords

Chapter the 340th, which demonstrates that decimation's what you need if you wanna be a world dictator. 

Plot:

The Doctor lands the TARDIS in Cardiff to refuel with time energy from the rift. Captain Jack, who has been waiting near there to catch up with a chronologically-aligned version of the Doctor, runs towards the TARDIS, grabs hold and clings to the outer Police Box shell as the ship travels through the space-time vortex. Jack's immortal nature, bestowed on him by Bad Wolf Rose, sparks a reaction in the ship, and it flies forward in time 100 trillion years to the end of the universe. The Doctor, Martha and Jack find themselves on the planet Malcassairo. In a compound besieged by savage Futurekind, a band of surviving humans there await transportation to Utopia, their last hope of refuge. The Doctor helps the kindly Professor Yana and his assistant Chan-tho to get the rocket ready. While the Doctor and Jack are off fixing the rocket's power source, Martha notices that Yana has a pocket watch exactly like the Doctor's when he turned himself into a human. She runs to tell the Doctor. The rocket takes off, bound for Utopia. Yana - his attention finally drawn to the watch and breaking through its perception filter - opens the watch and becomes the Master. The Master turns on Chan-tho, killing her, but not before she shoots him. He regenerates and takes the Doctor's TARDIS, leaving him with Martha and Jack as the Futurekind break into the compound and surround them. The Doctor fixes Jack's vortex manipulator allowing the three of them to transport themselves back to contemporary London. The Doctor managed to lock the TARDIS controls before the Master escaped, meaning it can only travel to and from the last two visited locations, the far future and contemporary Earth.

Because of a margin of error, the Master has been on Earth for 18 months before they arrive, has styled himself as Harry Saxon, got married to Lucy, and become Prime Minister. The Doctor and his friends are wanted criminals. The Master has created a satellite network around Earth called Archangel, and has used this to hypnotise the populace into voting for him. The Doctor fixes his party up with perception filters linked to the network that allow them to go unobserved and investigate. The Master announces that he has made contact with an alien lifeform - the Toclafane, floating spheres with childlike voices - and they will arrive on Earth the next morning. The Master is aboard a UNIT skybase called Valiant when first contact happens. The Doctor, Martha and Jack come aboard the Valiant and discover the TARDIS there: it has been turned into a paradox machine. They go to the Valiant's bridge as the paradox machine activates, and millions of Toclafane arrive on Earth. The Master has been able to see through the Doctor's perception filters. He kills Jack and ages the Doctor into an old man. The Master orders the Toclafane to decimate Earth's population. While this is happening, Jack revives and gives his vortex manipulator to Martha so she can escape. The Doctor whispers something to her. She leaves, then spends a year walking the Earth, hidden from the Toclafane by the perception filter. The Master has spent the year using slave labour to build a fleet of ships to conquer the universe, and also torturing (in a low level camp way) the Doctor, Jack and Martha's family aboard the valiant. He ages the Doctor again, turning him into a tiny wee shrivelled form. Martha goes to meet with a scientist in the human resistance. They capture a Toclafane.

Opening it up, they find a human head - the Toclafane are the humans from the end of the universe. They never found Utopia, and instead turned themselves into decapitated heads in techno-spheres (as one does). The Master has promised that they can conquer the universe such that their desperate future will never come to pass. He took Lucy Saxon with him to see this bleak future, and this broke her mind. Martha lets slip to the scientist that her mission for the last year has been spent assembling a gun that can kill the Master. The scientist turns traitor and informs on her. It's all a bluff, though; Martha just wanted to be brought back aboard the Valiant around the time the Master is launching his fleet. The Doctor knew that he would not be able to resist a countdown, and he'd tasked Martha with spreading the word to everyone she's met in the year to think of the word Doctor during the countdown. This collective thought is amplified by the Archangel network, which the Doctor has spent the last year mentally tuning in to, and he's able - somehow - to use the mental energy to de-age himself and float threateningly towards the Master. Jack destroys the paradox machine. Time reverts to just before the Toclafane descended en masse, with only those on the Valiant remembering the year that never was. The Doctor plans to take the Master into his personal custody. Lucy shoots the Master, and he supresses his regenerative powers to avoid becoming the Doctor's captive. Captain Jack returns to his Torchwood team, Martha decides to stop travelling with the Doctor, and everyone goes on with their lives. Except for all the people in the year 100 trillion who die a horrible death as the universe ends, obviously.

Context:

As you'll see if you glance below at the Milestone Watch, I have very few stories left to blog; as such, why would I cover as one what some people - including the writer of the scripts, Russell T Davies - consider as two separate stories? I hate to disagree with Davies (but Doctor Who Magazine agrees with me, so there!) but I can't see it that way. Although a different director handles the first part, the three parts are tightly connected covering the return of the Master: there are plot questions left dangling in Utopia that only get answered in the other two parts, and there are many moments in those other two parts that only have meaning if one has seen Utopia. I considered binging all three parts in one go, but kept getting interrupted. In the end, I watched the three parts over the course of about a week, with irregular gaps in between. To my surprise, the Better Half joined me for all three parts. She very rarely watches Doctor Who of any era any more, but hadn't seen these episodes since they were first shown, and was curious how they held up. She made a few comments during the running time, but gave me instructions not to share them on the blog (instructions accompanied by a stern look, so I took them seriously). What I will share is that she was disappointed at the end that "John Simm didn't win". After watching the episodes, the fam went away for half term and stayed in a few places in the UK, meaning I couldn't write up the blog post immediately. One of the places we visited was Cardiff, and I finally found time to go to the bay, take a photo in Roald Dahl Plass (where the TARDIS materialises at the beginning of this story) and visit Ianto's Shrine (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the previous blog post for more details).

Me at the foot of Torchwood Tower

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This story completes another season and another Doctor's set of TV stories. That makes it 13 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-14), and 39 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, seven now remain.

First Time Round:

I watched each of the three parts on their broadcast debuts on BBC1 in the UK, accompanied for each as I was on this watch by the Better Half. That was back in June 2007. I remember the blogs and message boards exploded into paroxysms of excitement over the final 15 minutes of Utopia, and then everyone online being much less enamoured of the other two parts. For Last of the Time Lords, friends Alex and Rachel (mentioned a few times before on this blog) joined us in our then home in Hove for the weekend, and watched live with us. I remember the Better Half and Rachel discussing the high 'eye candy' quotient of the episode with Simm, Tennant and John Barrowman all found to be visually pleasing to one or both of them.

Reaction:

Perhaps some fans like to split this three-parter up (see Context section above) because of the differences in general enthusiasm that met the episodes when they first aired (see First Time Round section above). They can mentally salvage Utopia at the expense of The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords. Utopia is directed solely by a hero of Doctor Who's production (old and new) in Graeme Harper. It has a barnstorming (albeit dramatically incomplete) ending. It avoids inclusion of a few camp, silly moments - of the kind that are usually anathema to the serious-minded fan - from the later episodes, including some aspects of John Simm's performance (it could be the Master that's enjoying himself a little too much, or it could be Simm - I'll come back to that in a moment). In the first part, the viewer mainly gets to enjoy Derek Jacobi's two contrasting - but both solid and traditional - performances as Professor Yana and then the Master. The former is a delightful balancing act with the script and the acting giving tiny hints at Yana's true identity so that the last 15 minutes of Utopia seem inevitable, though still surprising. The cherry on the cake is having the professor's loyal assistant character Chan-Tho, used throughout the episode up to that point as comic relief, become the Master's first victim on regaining his identity. The climactic sequence of Utopia is magnificent, and rewards multiple viewings: the reveal of the pocket watch Time Lords can use to transform themselves into humans, the revelation of what the Face of Boe's dying words mean, the Master's regeneration with John Simm's very Doctorish post-regeneration dialogue, and the cliffhanger with our heroes trapped without the TARDIS, stranded and surrounded. All of this underscored by urgent, driving Murray Gold magnificence.

What about the the 30 minutes before the climactic sequence, though? Yana and Chan-Tho aside, there's one nice character / long-term continuity moment with the Doctor and Jack's conversation about what happened to make him immortal, how the Doctor instinctively reacts to that, and Jack's explanation of what he did next to end up on contemporary Earth waiting out the Doctor's reappearance. The rest of Utopia is not as memorable: the final humans awaiting their trip to Utopia are a dull bunch, and the Futurekind are a pretty uninspired 'monster', looking as they do like a musical theatre punk gang. It also harms the reveal of the Toclafane's true nature later on to feature another tribe of antagonists who were humans but who've degenerated into savagery. What Utopia still has by the end is hope. Alas, for all the camp - and there's quite a lot of camp - in the latter two thirds, by the end of part three there's not much hope left for humanity. It's very bleak, and so probably needed those moments, such as the Master dancing around to a Scissor Sisters song, to lighten the mood. 100 trillion years into the future, the last surviving humans have their final hope dashed, become trapped with the universe collapsing around them, cannibalise themselves, and regress to childishness and psychopathy. That is Doctor Who's canonically established final fate for the human race. Not only that, but a human from our time (Lucy Saxon) is made to witness this and loses her mind and her soul in consequence (it's only on this latest watch that I fully realised how well Alexandra Moen's performance captures all that). If the Master keeping the Doctor in a dog kennel or turning him into a house elf rubs you the wrong way, just consider how depressing this story would have proved if played more sombrely.

John Simm's performance as the Master has come in for some criticism over the years since this story; love it or not, though, his take on the character has become the standard approach for the 21st century. Those that followed him in the role all accentuated the manic rather than the more suave antagonism that was the template for the 20th century. To answer the question I posed earlier, I do think it is the character rather than the actor having the fun in all the many scenes of Simm's screwball villainy. This is the portrayal of someone who's been imprisoned for decades in the body and mind of a different personality (one the Master considers a hapless dope); seen as depicting the Master's behaviour after such captivity, the choices Simm makes seem believable to me. There's also a certain desperation in the character's actions: he's practically begging for the Doctor to notice and engage with him (and this is very consistent with how the character acted in the classic series too). Plus, of course - and this is again in line with what had come before - he's crazy. Davies adds to the character's mythology by suggesting he's been driven mad by hearing a constant drumbeat in his head. I was a bit dubious of this when I first watched the story, but the subsequent explanations in David Tennant's finale The End of Time made it work for me retroactively. The moment in that later story where Simm and Tennant react in shock realising the noise in the Master's head is tangible and not just a symptom of madness is so wonderful that it's worth all three parts of the Toclafane story just to set it up. His interplay with Tennant, and lots of little moments - the big thumbs up to people as he's killing them with poison gas, the in-joke where he appreciates some kids' TV (Teletubbies here, calling back to a scene where he watched The Clangers in a 1970s story) - make him one of my favourite Masters of all.

To take on some other criticisms: the 'reset' at the end - where time is wound back for everyone but the Saxons, the Doctor and his friends - is not a cop-out, but is carefully plotted and earned. The Toclafane are destroying their own past, and the paradox can only be sustained with TARDIS shenanigans, as is underlined repeatedly. The dramatic question is how will the Doctor reverse all this, not how the planet will rebuild itself, and that's clear before the Master operates his paradox engine and before he starts decimating people. The aged Doctor's CGI form is a bit silly, but that's about the execution not the concept; if Doctor Who started playing it safe and not overreaching itself regarding what it can depict on screen, it wouldn't be Doctor Who anymore (and besides the Dobby Doctor is very cute). The device of everyone chanting the Doctor's name and him using the psychic energy of that through the Archangel network to rejuvenate himself makes sense, just about. The network being connected to people's perceptions and therefore able to channel psychic energy is well seeded; it's only that energy being able to be absorbed and used by a Time Lord that's a bit of a leap and we've certainly seen Time Lords do stranger things over the years. I'll grant that, once restored, the Doctor does get a bit messianic (it's a theme of this period - in the next story he's carried aloft by a couple of angels). This is more than made up for by the scene of the Master's death in the Doctor's arms, the former refusing to regenerate despite the pleading of the latter.

I'm not saying it's perfect by any means, just that I don't see that much of a difference between Utopia and the final two parts: both are at the same high level of quality for me (and for those fans that can't rate any work as highly as that directed by Graeme Harper, please note that he did uncredited work on the latter two parts when their director Colin Teague was injured during filming). One issue is that there's almost nothing for Captain Jack to do in the final part: he's kept chained up in a side room for swathes of the running time, like Nicola Bryant in Timelash. This isn't just bad for the character, but it also highlights another flaw: why doesn't he go with Martha at the end of The Sound of Drums, rather than sending her off on her own. We've seen that his time travel bracelet is capable of carrying more than one person at a time, and he's got to be more use with her, as the man who can't die, than he is imprisoned by the Master. Dramatically, it's because Martha needs to be on her own, of course (though she's ably supported by strong performances from Tom Ellis and Ellie Haddington in the final part). Freema Agyeman is a very capable supporting actor, but not a lead; nonetheless, the final episode works reasonably well structured around her (her bits are better than the somewhat pointless 'loop scene'' where the Doctor and the others attempt an escape from the Master, only to be foiled and end up exact where they started). Balancing out these small flaws, though, are the moments that give loads of pleasure throughout all three parts: the look on Jabobi's face and the little turn of the head he gives to show us he's transformed (and the way Harper frames the shot), the first ever glimpse of Time Lords and Gallifrey in a new series flashback accompanied by Murray Gold's transcendent cue, all of Gold's music, including some rock guitar during Utopia, loads of funny Captain Jack lines ("Was someone kissing me?") and lots more.

Connectivity:

Both this three-part story (yes it is!) and Torchwood: Children of Earth feature Captain Jack and have scenes set in Cardiff and London. Both feature scenes where the UK government's cabinet meet in Downing Street rooms, and the Prime Minister at the heads of both those governments is villainous, to a greater or lesser degree.

Deeper Thoughts:

A Master for All Seasons. The Master is a character often in search of a raison d'être. This might have something to do with how he was originally created. 1970s producer and script editor team Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks wanted to create the Doctor Who equivalent of the Moriarty character in Sherlock Holmes stories. The character was always envisaged to be a recurring foe, not just a single story adversary (unlike, say, the Daleks who had only originally been intended to feature once). So, the Master's villainy did not arise from a specific circumstance. Letts and Dicks added the character to every one of the five stories of his first season. During that span, the Master allied himself to Autons, Axons and Daemons, tried to hijack a missile, successfully hijacked a prison, created mischief on a colony world, tried to locate a superweapon, and much more besides. What underlying motivation could marry up all these different nefarious activities into a coherent plan? None, obviously. Generally, production teams have explicitly or implicitly favoured one of two slightly lame explanations. One is that all these activities are just seen by the character as game playing with the Doctor, trying to score points or get his attention. The other is the usual fallback for any genre villain with inadequate motivation: he's cuckoo bananas. The Toclafane 3-parter hints at the former, but more explicitly plumps for the latter. In the early days, the character was a lot calmer and so it's difficult to believe that he's being driven insane by a drumbeat in his head (but as that only starts to happen when the Master's personal history is altered by the Time Lords during the Time War, it's perhaps logical to think that hasn't happened to any of the pre-Simm Masters anyway).

There's an argument to be made that a villain being a villain just for the sake of it doesn't hurt the sort of genre stories Doctor Who deals in - it may even help. Heck, even all Letts's and Dicks's Moriarty talk is somewhat overblown compared to the character's actual genesis. What seems to have happened is that they thought it would be a good idea to cast Roger Delgado as a villain, and - quite frankly - that was already more than enough: he proved them right in his every appearance. When relaunching the character, the 21st century production team again killed it with the casting. Coming straight off Life On Mars, a time travel show in which he was the lead, John Simm was exactly the sort of person that one could see getting cast as the Doctor one day, and this created a very slightly different conception of the character: he's just like the Doctor, but bad. Simm's debut hammers this point home by having him accompanied by his own companion, wielding a (laser) screwdriver, and even offering someone a jelly baby at one point.  It's tapping into something that's been there from the beginning in an unspoken way (cf. Delgado in the final episode of Claws of Axos, helping UNIT arguably more than the Doctor does in the same story) and always would be to some extent. All that really changed was the casting as successive teams over the years found the right person to pair with whoever was playing the hero at that point; sometimes the look or performance of the Master was counterpoint, but often it was more a dark reflection. Just as some Doctor companion pairings work better than others, there's a chemistry in specific Doctor and Master pairings too. Delgado with Pertwee, of course - one white-haired, one dark, one wearing colourful dandyish clothes, the other wearing sombre suits. They started things off so successfully, the role of the Master looked like it might not ever be recast.

When Delgado's tragic death robbed the series of the character, it took a good few years for a return. Even then, the character had been remodelled as a monstrous walking cadaver - the Master in name only - and featured in just a single story during nearly a decade following Delgado's passing. It was only as Tom Baker was handing over to Peter Davison that time enough had passed, and - in a three-part relaunch just as would be done in 2007, across stories The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis and Castrovalva, the Master played by Anthony Ainley emerged to become the principal returning nemesis of the early 80s. Although he appeared with other Doctors, it was Ainley with Davison that was the key pairing. There's a picture (see above) of them both that exemplifies this: one fair, one dark, with their costumes mirroring this. Paul McGann and Eric Roberts both got to play the characters for one night only; again, they are paired well, with Roberts getting a costume change so he can do fabulous camp as well as the Terminator-inspired black leather jacketed look. Simm - though he also returned later with another Doctor - is perfectly paired with Tennant. The next - and, to date, final - two pairings used the gender-swapping possibilities of regeneration to create counterpoint: a male Doctor in Capaldi paired with a female Master (or Missy, but given that the villainous handle is deliberately an academic title like Doctor, then of course Missy can go on calling herself the Master) played by Michelle Gomez; then both roles swapped gender and Jodie Whittaker's Doctor was perfectly paired with Sacha Dhawan as the Master. Both these versions of the Master dressed - and acted - a lot more colourfully than their corresponding Doctors, which is an interesting development. What will happen next? Now that the future of Doctor Who has been confirmed, it's fun to be able to speculate again...

In Summary:

Not perfect, but not nearly as bad as its reputation - all three parts of it!

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.