"He has hidden in the howling void. He has hidden within the tempest. He has braved the storm and the darkness and the pain. And he whispered to the vessel. All this time, he whispered and delighted and seduced, and the vessel did obey, for none should be more mighty and none should be more wise than the King himself. And the Lord of Time was blind and vain, and knew nothing."
IN THIS ONE... The Doctor investigates who might be Ruby's mother.
REVIEW: Having the Doctor investigate a science fiction mystery for the length of an episode feels like the Doctor Who I want to watch, and Gatwa even seems more like a traditional Doctor while he's doing it. Like when he's laughing at how ropey UNIT's time window is; that's more cruel than his usual, but not unlike, say Capaldi or either Baker. He punches walls and needs Mel to bring him out of his funk (she DID pal around with Sixie, so this isn't new). What's unfortunate is that the answers this investigation will yield are not well thought-out, generally disappointing and possibly even cheats. Ruby's bio-mom will have to keep for the next episode, but we WILL learn who the Big Bad (the "One Who Waits") is, and uncover the mystery of why Susan Twist has played a character in every episode this year. And the answers don't quite make sense...
Let's attack it directly. When the Doctor brings the "mystery woman" to UNIT's attention, they immediately recognize her as Susan Triad, who is a kind of ubiquitous Steve Jobs figure (a role for which she seems miscast, but fine), except really nice. She's been dreaming all the other identities and proves to be a harbinger/vessel of, wait for it, Sutekh. They'll get into this more next episode, but the evil god from Pyramids of Mars has been holding on to the TARDIS since forever and seeding Susans everywhere. Of course, if that were true, we would have noticed her before this season, but fine. I know gods are long-lived and can afford to be patient, but Sutekh accompanying the Doctor through time and space for 1600 years without making a move is weird, 1600 years that include the blasted ship EXPLODING (during the Moffat era) and you don't even want to know what in the extra-canon. But even if I accept all that, the One Who Waits - a member of the "Pantheon" and parent to the Toymaker etc. - being Sutekh just doesn't ring true. Yeah, we all love Pyramids of Mars, and it's great to have Gabriel Woolf (the Bad Woolf) lending his voice to this villain again, but... what?! Sutekh was an Osiran, powerful aliens who were mistaken for Egyptian gods in Antiquity and gave rise to that religion, until he was imprisoned by the others on Mars. But now he's more powerful than god-like beings we've seen before and brother/father/whatever to such creatures as the Mara (from Kinda/Snakedance) and the Trickster (from the Sarah Jane Adventures)?! In Pyramids, he used cultists and doofy mummy robots; here, it's sleeper agents created out of whole cloth, a person with the last name Harbinger (like Maestro's), and so on... Quite frankly, this should have been Fenric, playing chess with the Doctor across all of space-time, and using a special bloodline to turn normal people into minions. You could even have had a canine creature clinging to the TARDIS in the same way as the CG jackal they make Sutekh out to be. So a big, big miss here, at least from a continuity expert's point of view. For new viewers, it wouldn't have mattered either way (except Tales of the TARDIS would have had to show a 7th Doctor story instead of a 4th, and for my money, Fenric is better than Pyramids, so). Carla mentions the "beast", by which she means the devil, but as Woolf played him in The Satan Pit, and the kind of possession we see here is more him than Sutekh, that would have worked too (and not so long a ride on the TARDIS exterior - I mean, Jack NOOOOOO, but this thing, yes?!). The skull heads on the minions seem right out of Faction Paradox, but that would be impossible. All we really have of Sutekh is that he turns people into sand (that's Egyptian, right?) and that his plan is to lay waste to the universe as per the vision Sarah Jane was shown in that classic serial.
But we're not really expecting a revelation of the Big Bad Woolf since Russell T Davies is heavily trolling the audience about the identity of the Mother and of Susan Triad. When you make the opening teaser's cliffhanger turn on the latter (or either) being Susan Foreman, the Doctor's granddaughter, making it a huge red herring is incredibly annoying. Davies loves his "memes", so there's the anagram that actually turns out to be a portmanteau in the end, dumb word play as if every villain is doing the Master's shtick of hiding in plain sight (they even try to make us think S. Triad IS the Master by using the four-beat Master theme - another cheat). Structurally, giving Triad and Ruby's mom equal priority even for UNIT is messy - it's a huge leap and indeed, there's no connection - and what we learn here won't really jibe with the final revelations at the end of Empire of Death. There's no reason to make the time window scene so creepy when the actual scene in The Church on Ruby Road was actually quite normal. The Doctor claims his memories of the event keep changing, but why is this "fixed point" in flux? It's a cheat. They're making us believe in something that will turn out not to be true, because as usual, Davies is too obsessed with confounding expectations to craft a logical - or even satisfying - story. IT'S OKAY TO GIVE US WHAT WE WANT OR EXPECT, RUSSELL!
And given that there's a UNIT mini-series coming, every time we see UNIT in the current series seems important. Unfortunately, I really don't like this version of UNIT. What are their hiring practices, exactly? I suppose they couldn't get Ruth Madeley back as Shirley Bingham, but replacing her with a 13-year-old boy?! No matter how "enhanced" his intelligence is, he's still a teenager. I absolutely loathe The Vinx. Rose Noble is an 18-year-old with no practical experience. Even the idea of bringing in all the former companions means they have lots of grannies running around as field agents. This UNIT is closer to Sarah Jane Adventures than Torchwood, and I don't think it works. The show has an opportunity to get rid of much of this through Sutkeh, but (spoiler), it doesn't happen. So either the upcoming mini-series ignores a lot of this, or it's going to provoke more frowns.
THEORIES: There's a lot to unpack here, but I'm gonna wait for the next episode so we have all the facts. Or maybe not, since a lot of it doesn't make sense no matter how you try to no-prize it. The one I SHOULD speak to here is the notion that the Doctor has a granddaughter, but hasn't had a son or daughter yet. If this were a glib joke about Time Lord existence, that would be something. But the conversation goes on, and in earnest. It doesn't even make sense within the continuity of RTD's first turn as showrunner, since Doc10 himself said he had been a father. The Doctor has indeed mentioned several times in the new series that he had been a parent, usually followed by his companion's shocked face. And given that we're now in an era where he's once again "last of the Time Lords", who is he mating with to create this future offspring? We can't even turn to looms (unless they still exist, but the Doctor hasn't started them up?). The Doctor sure seems to think Susan is a Time Lord with regeneration ability, but I suppose she could be half human. My theory, if I need one, is that this is just more trolling and more nonsense from a showrunner who has always had those two problems - it's just more obvious now.
REWATCHABILITY: Medium-Low - On first watch, it's very intriguing, but what happens here doesn't lead to there convincingly, so rewatching it is more frustrating.
Comments
While we can handwave Sutekh managing to stick with the Tardis through the events of The Big Bang, and even the Flux, as being conveniently forgotton by RTD in the new series, the major plot hole I can see is the question of how he stuck to this Tardis during the bigeneration in The Giggle. Or is another bit of Sutekh sitting on Fourteen's Tardis, parked somewhere in a suburb of London?
What really rankles is that a two-part finale was retained within an already truncated season. In a series where Ncuti's shooting time was limited, apart from opening episodes and the introductory sections of Rogue, we've seen very little of travelling pair interacting, or more specifically, enjoying themselves, the core aspect of DW which you would desperately hope to connote to 1st time Disney viewers. It's little wonder that the season has felt so disjointed. And when they have been together, the only topic of conversation seems to be about Ruby's parentage, an already generic companion reduced to a singular association.