Doctor Who #994: The Doctor Falls

"Where there's tears, there's hope."

TECHNICAL SPECS: First aired Jul.1 2017.

IN THIS ONE... The Doctor vs. Mondasian Cybermen. Missy vs. the Master. And Bill vs. despair!

REVIEW: On first viewing, I had to admit my roommate and I were so DEVASTATED at the end of The Doctor Falls that we sat speechless for a number of minutes and had to force ourselves to talk about. While hope is a major theme, the series finale is insistently desperate and dark. So this review follows some amount of procrastination, as if my soul still doesn't want to commit words to screen. But allons-y...

Now, I'm a sucker for strong thematic underpinnings, and we get that here. Some have already called into question the Doctor's resistance to regenerating, on the heels (if a thousand years or so can be called heels) of the 11th Doctor's beautiful speech about accepting the fact that we change over time. Well first, he's not the same person, so he doesn't think about it the same way. Second, there's precedent for the Doctor staving off death, as it were, as the 5th and 10th both did. And third, holding on to who you are is the bloody THEME of the thing. Think about it. It's what keeps Bill from succumbing to Cyber programming (and before that, to the Monk's). It's played out in the Masters' thread, one executing the other to prevent himself from changing and standing with the Doctor in the end. And though it's not spelled out in so many words, we've had enough moments with the 12th Doctor both regretting the evils he's done and hoping to redeem Missy, that we should be able to see him as someone deathly afraid that he's getting worse, not better. The Master is a mirror image of the Doctor, a warning.

Indeed, the bit where I start to blub is that amazing speech about who he is and why he does what he does. And that at least has been a constant through all of his lives. But the end part, probably because Capaldi's voice breaks at just the end, completely destroyed me: "Who I am is where I stand. And where I stand is where I fall." And then, to the Masters, "Stand with me". They walk away, but the moment, and what follows, is filled to the brim with irony. Though Missy follows the Simm-Master to a TARDIS escape, as if actually caught up in a twisted narcissistic romance, she grabs the Doctor's hand and what he discovers there shocks him, I think. We find out later that she let him feel the knife she was about to stab into the younger Master's back. Because though redeemed - her ambivalence in this episode is largely the result of telepathic influence from the wicked Master, and wanes when he's knocked out - and holding on to the self she has become over the time she was locked away in the Vault, she is nevertheless treacherous. That is also part of her nature. Simm's Master, for his cruel part, claims not to have listened to a word of the speech and is unmoved, and yet I believe the speech is exactly what makes him kill his future self, rather than let her/himself betray the core Master identity by standing with the Doctor. The lure of evil remains strong for Missy, as she reveals in a moment harking back to Time Crash where Doc10 also told his past self he loved being him. But that's the programming talking, it's what she must resist to stay true to herself now.

So when the Doctor is finally alone - having sent Nardole to his ultimate fate protecting a farming community from Cybermen, likely until the end of his natural life, and Bill to the other end of floor 507 - he proves that he is who he is. We get a call-back to the idea of doing good without witness, without reward, and that's actually what happens. And when he destroys floor 507 and the vast majority of Cybermen with it, we see him refuse the regeneration, not because of some kind of narcissism as Doc10 had - he rather loathes himself, I think - but because he's lived long enough. He's willing to die as the 12th and final Doctor (actually a 13th identity, and the normal "life span" of a Time Lord). He's not curious about what's next, he's afraid of it. When he finally dies, his body is inert for the longest time, and only Bill's "hopeful" tears start the regeneration process. In that context, it makes perfect sense that Doc12 will need his original incarnation to make him realize regeneration/change is inevitable and beneficial. He needs a reminder of why this all started (and boy did my heart leap up when I saw they actually cast An Adventure in Space and Time's David Bradley!).

(Four paragraphs in, and I've only just touched on a single aspect of The Doctor Falls. We're in trouble.)

We don't say goodbye to Capaldi's Doctor yet, but we do lose an awful lot of long-running characters. I don't know that the show will want to live long without a Master, so we can probably bank on them being wrong about one of two things. Either Missy CAN regenerate despite getting the "full load", or Simm doesn't become Missy yet and there's one or more Masters in between. This is a character who's survived immolation and didn't even give an explanation for it (after the first immolation, I mean; see?). But was there anywhere for a "goodie" Master to go? This poetically correct ending may be the proper one... if future showrunners can keep their hands to themselves and not undo it. It's a fine send-off, with both Masters getting some great lines and shticks. As for Nardole, I'm not sure he ever really realized his potential as a character, always either a tool to get things moving or comic relief, in my eyes, but he gets a fairly heroic end, and a shot at a normal-ish life (possibly married to someone I can't see but as the pregnant Jeffina in Coupling).

And then there's Bill. I've been resistant to say this was the end of her tenure with the Doctor, but though there's hope (there were certainly tears), it was all but confirmed even before the start of Series 10 that she wouldn't stick around for longer, giving Chris Chibnall a clean slate in time for the regime change. As I said at the end of the previous episode, the idea of a companion, especially one I've deeply enjoyed, ending up as a Cyberman, is so stomach-churning - not just to me, and therefore we thankfully cut between Cyber-Bill and the image of her human self throughout the episode - I would have taken any deus ex machina at the end of the finale. We do get one, but it happily doesn't come out of nowhere. Heather, the "Pilot" from the first episode returns, having kept tabs on Bill through lent tears (a serendipitous discovery, or planned from the beginning?), returns to rescue her. She is turned into a puddle being herself - the Cybersuit falls dead and empty - and can finally join her love on magical spacetime jaunts. It's left ambiguous as to whether she might return, and I'm even left wondering if, having cried on the Doctor, she will keep similar tabs on him, but I do agree that companions should be tailored to the Doctor, and if the Doctor is going to change, the dynamic may no longer be workable. (Then again, the Doctor's changed saved Clara as a character.) To cut off fan criticism here too, some have complained that this is too much like Clara's fate, or a cheap cop-out; I would rather follow the lead of one commenter, a gay woman, who thought it remarkable that someone like her got a happy (and romantic) ending, something rarely afforded LGBTQ+ characters on television. Moffat himself has said he doesn't think Doctor Who is the right place for nihilistic and cynical stories where beloved characters are killed. He gets them real close though, doesn't he? At the end, Bill HAS changed, but retained the essential part of herself, a lesson the Doctor narrowly misses, but that his former self understood.

Let me close on a few random notes I couldn't mention anywhere else, because hey, this was a BIG episode. I like that because of the time differential, we essentially see the expedition to floor 507 mentioned in the previous episode - they never returned because they were shot and became creepy scarecrows. That the Mondasian Cybermen evolve to become those sleek one from Nightmare in Silver is fine, but I do so hate it when the reuse the Cybusmen from the parallel Earth. Doesn't make sense to me. (More on how this all connects to Cyber-lore under Theories.) The early pastoral look of the piece, turning to some kind of eerie perpetual twilight, then to a WWI-style wasteland, is all quite striking, exteriors matching the deterioration of the Doctor's own life. There are tons of references to Cyberman stories, even extracanonical ones that make those stories proper canon now (including one with Frobisher), but more importantly, quotes or paraphrasing of Doctors' famous last lines, including "Where's there's life, there's hope" (3rd Doctor) which, slightly altered, is a motif here. Capaldi says them differently, and they take on new meanings, which is interesting. His almost-regeneration is accompanied by a montage of new series companions saying his name, going all the way back to Rose - but no Rory?! for shame!!! - surely a call-back to the 5th Doctor's regeneration. /random notes

THEORIES: So okay, the Doctor waves away a lot of necessary fan theory to make Cyber-history work (Mondas, Telos, etc.) by saying Cybernisation, in certain cultures I guess, is inevitable, and that it comes down to parallel development. That's a bit glib, and if that were all there was to it, the ship wouldn't need to come from Mondas. So it is acceptable that because Mondasians have the same problems (pollution and health) and same core technologies, they will go on to evolve into Cybermen. In their first appearance, The Tenth Planet, the Cybermen want Earth because there own world is dying. Before they turned to cybernisation, Mondas apparently sent ships to other places, Telos perhaps, though it's not clear where this colony ship actually came from. Ship's log says Mondas, but if that's so, why isn't it already full when it sets off? Could it have been built elsewhere (with Telosian or Planet 14 resources?) then sent home to Mondas to save what was left of the population from a decaying planet? That would, at least, save the excellent audio adventure Spare Parts from ignoble wiping from the canon. It also brings back the old speculation about Pete's World, and whether that was Mondas rather than Earth. But here's a crazier idea. The episode ends with the Doctor apparently meeting his first self on an arctic (or should I say Antarctic) plain, apparently just before he first changes (going by the snatches of monologue we hear). That's The Tenth Planet. Has the TARDIS basically followed the colony ship out of the black hole to its ultimate destiny? And ARE the Cybermen from this episode the same as the ones in The Tenth Planet (only the sock-heads survive this encounter)? The wonky, hard-to-swallow idea that a whole planet would come near Earth and be destroyed in high orbit and our surviving that could thus be retconned so that the giant ship was the planet (seen from its circular front). They don't need to recognize the Doctor's name, since wonky temporal physics would make their arrival generations later than their time at the black hole. Looks like I've got until the Christmas special to watch The Tenth Planet again and get a better handle on this.

REWATCHABILITY: High - One of the great series finales. Gut-wrenching, thematically consistent, fully of fun quirks and devastating turns. And yet, still not the end...