The Doctor Falls

The Doctor Falls – at least we know he will be gone on Christmas Day and I’m rather missing him already. This last series of Doctor Who has, to my mind, been the best since the series returned. A seeming match of great writing, smart direction and perfect performances from the cast without a single duff episode has made this a memorable swansong for Steven Moffat , Peter Capaldi and (presumably) Pearl Mackie and Matt Lucas in their respective roles.

The finales of Doctor who are, more often than not, something of a let-down – a great leading episode  with an unsatisfactory resolution or a simple anti-climax. Not this year: The World Enough and Time was a superb origin story for the Cybermen (there have been more than one both on screen and elsewhere) which really captured the body horror of the whole concept. Aside from the original Cyberman story, The Tenth Planet which aired way back in 1966, the Cybermen have appeared to be more armoured robots than living entities. This year we started to see the full process starting with simple life support devices, through the sight of the human features disappearing under fabric until the recognisable Cybermen appeared. Tellingly, this was not on a random side character but on the Doctor’s beloved companion – someone who we felt empathy and affection for.

I do try my best to avoid spoilers but I knew from the BBC’s own previews that John Simm’s master was returning. Even knowing that, I genuinely didn’t spot his disguise until the reveal. Having started out with Roger Delgado’s original Master I should have seen that coming but the reveal was a genuine delight. However, the confrontation between the Master and Missy was more intriguing. Was Missy genuinely trying to be good like the Doctor and would the Master really prefer to be dead than good? There were hints as to the origin of the Doctor-Master rivalry but still not a satisfactory explanation of why they were to turn Good/Bad other than to preserve some sort of balance to the universe. That’s one for another day or, like the Doctor’s real name, a question that should probably never be answered.

The Doctor Falls felt epic in the sort of way that Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns do. In fact there was an element of Murray Gold’s score that aped The Ecstasy of Gold from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. In a way the episode had a similar theme to many of the classic Westerns with our heroes sacrificing everything to protect a small rural community from a relentless onslaught of marauding bandits. What really grabbed my attention with this was the section with the Cyber-converted Bill slowly discovering the reality of what had happened to her. For a packed episode this was a wonderfully slow paced sequence and again captured the true essence of the horror of the Cybermen. Maybe the eventual “blow ‘em all up” solution was a bit too obvious but ultimately the defeat of the enemy was not what this episode was all about. Was the eventual conclusion for Bill a little bit of a sentimental cop-out? Possibly, but at the same time it felt like a fitting resolution to Bill’s story – it’s just a pity that we have only had her for the one series.

I ended up having to re-watch the last 5 minutes on the iPlayer as BBC Scotland messed up the sound but this was where our Doctor finally fell: fighting off regeneration until the second (thankfully spoiler-avoided) surprise reveal which places our Doctor back in 1966 - possibly in Antarctica? William Hartnell was ill during the production of Tenth Planet and missed the filming for the third episode. As a nice piece of retrofit could the First Doctor have been away meeting the Twelfth? David Bradley played William Hartnell in the docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time. It was a wonderful production and Bradley was astonishingly accurate as Hartnell – he is probably better known for Game of Thrones or Harry Potter but he is one of our great character actors and it should make for a Christmas episode to remember. It will be Capaldi and Moffat’s last outing and should be a fitting conclusion to one of Doctor Who’s greatest eras.