Review Category: Doctor Who TV

DOCTOR WHO – Series 11 Episode 5, The Tsuranga Conundrum

The real conundrum thrown up by The Tsuranga Conundrum is, how do we go from the best of intentions – because nobody sets out to make a dull or uninspired production, no matter that it’s apparently the studio-bound mid-series quickie – to something that’s, at best, a bit lacklustre? All the elements are in place for a potentially cracking episode of Doctor Who; this had the set-up of something like Alien, a not-unlikeable cast and some beautifully designed and executed sets. Oh, and the creature, once it appeared, was exquisitely animated even if the concept and design were residing in different galaxies from one another. And the narrative, such as it was, was perfectly reasonable; this was Doctor Who as procedural in much the same way as the last two episodes had been, with roughly the same amount of logic and motion and there was nothing especially you could put your finger on and get burned by.

Yet once all this found itself in the pot together, it never really got cooking. It just kind of sat there, a meringue mixture filled with all the correct ingredients in essentially the right proportions, waiting to be mixed and cooked – and perhaps it was the lack of mixing that left it undercooked, because it’s become so easy this year to spot what Doctor Who’s doing, even the surprises aren’t remotely surprising.

Which begs two questions. How deliberate is the lack of mixing? And how important is the distinction? Because something really strange has happened this series, and it’s becoming more and more apparent in fans’ reactions to the episodes: Doctor Who is leaving much of its invested viewership behind.

So, let’s talk about mixing (after all, we had a rapper in the house this week).

Ordinarily, a lot of drama – and in particular Doctor Who – functions by working on multiple levels at the same time; one of the criticisms levelled at the previous regime was that people couldn’t follow the plots, or didn’t care about the characters, and this despite Steven Moffat doing everything Russell T Davies had previously done. Except Moffat tended to throw in one extra level of allusion and his varnish of comedy tended to be more evidently self-aware (Davies’ was just moderately self-aware). Chris Chibnall, on the other hand, despite being plentifully experienced at working to much the same template, has apparently deliberately chosen this year to make a version of Doctor Who where the ingredients are all laid out in a line in front of us. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean those ingredients are any less tasty – after all, a meringue isn’t the only thing you can make with sugar and eggs – but it does mean it’s very easy to sit there and spot ‘the sciencey bit’ or ‘the emotional bit’, and for a fandom that’s become used to showrunners who’re a whizz at baking up those ingredients till the constituent parts are invisible, stories like this in which they’re a plain as the egg on your face are a bit harder to stomach.

That doesn’t make this bad television, it just means it’s a rather odd Doctor Who.

And does it matter? Well, the answer to that is a rather puzzling yes and yes. Yes, on the one hand, because as Doctor Who fans, we don’t expect to be as spoon-fed as we are currently being (although sometimes we quite like it, if we’re completely honest). We like it when Doctor Who is simple and easy to follow, and predictable even, as long as it appeals to other parts of our fan-consciousness. So give us a bleak, lightning-rent planet and a performance like Philip Madoc’s and who cares about the illogicality, the disparate themes, and the predictable resolution in The Brain of Morbius. Woe betide you don’t include anything comparable, though.

But on the other hand, this isn’t Doctor Who for Doctor Who fans. And that’s the real puzzler. Because Russell T Davies didn’t make Doctor Who for Doctor Who fans either, yet his Doctor Who wasn’t like this. The difference is, Russell T Davies had a blank slate; Chris Chibnall doesn’t. Davies could essentially make any kind of programme he wanted, as long as it kept within a certain idea of the programme’s format. Steven Moffat inherited that programme, and pushed at the edges of what that format was – while still staying inside those boundaries. But after thirteen years of a particular kind of Doctor Who – Davies’, or Moffat’s Davies-squared – the programme has entered the arena of those things our TV audience takes for granted. And so the gradual decline in measurable viewing figures.

Chibnall hasn’t just moved Doctor Who to Sunday nights and cast an unexpected Doctor. He’s reprogrammed the cooker so that while the ingredients are all still there, the result is something entirely different. He’s made cookies, when we were hoping for meringue. And as lovely as cookies might be, they don’t have the sophistication or the skill in the execution. And when you’re used to the one thing, the other can be somewhat disappointing if not downright unpalatable.

But to people not used to the sophistication, this unsophisticated Doctor Who is just as nourishing in an easier-to-digest form.

The upshot is, this is a Doctor Who that’s patently working for everyone who ever thought that Doctor Who was something ‘a bit weird’. The ‘weirdness’ – the daffiness and idiosyncrasy; the flavour, maybe – has been whisked out of view. And what we’ve been left with is a Doctor Who that performs and functions according to its needs, but isn’t really then giving us a flavour or a texture to tingle our taste buds. It’s not quite Doctor Who-by-numbers, and that ‘weirdness’ really is still there; it’s inherent. It’s just hiding.

Hiding rather too well this week. The four regulars were great and Ryan and Graham in particular had some terrific moments. The rest? Russell T Davies once said he refused to set any story on the alien planet Zog because why would anyone watching care what happened there? That was The Tsuranga Conundrum’s biggest problem; in between all the gabbing and the explaining and the urgent standing around, and a final fifteen minutes where the tension did arise and this was not – by any stretch of the imagination – an episode without its moments, it didn’t really ask you to care.

And so whatever good intentions the production started out with, somewhere between the writers’ room and the director’s camera, the ingredients wound up being exposed. The problem set by the episode’s title (itself an allusion to Davies’ Zog that might have been better avoided) and its solution were fine. Everything else was fine. The characters were fine, the acting was fine, the photography was fine. But a whole lot of fine tends to have a negative effect when blended together; there wasn’t any pizzazz on the menu, and so the cook rustled up something less than whelming.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 5: “THE TSURANGA CONUNDRUM” / WRITER: CHRIS CHIBNALL / DIRECTOR: JENNIFER PERROTT / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, BRETT GOLDSTEIN, LOIS CHIMIMBA, SUZANNE PACKER, BEN BAILEY SMITH / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED NOVEMBER 4TH)

DOCTOR WHO Series 11, Episode 4: Arachnids in the UK

Eight years ago Chris Chibnall contributed to Steven Moffat’s first series in charge of Doctor Who, by writing a two-part story that took in a number of elements from specific serials of the Third Doctor’s tenure. Notably, of course, The Silurians, but we also had a location being isolated by a force-field, such as had happened in The Dæmons – both stories from the first two of those Third Doctor seasons. Now Chibnall has returned to the era, this time its latter end, in order to borrow the premise of The Green Death, transposed onto the eponymous creatures from Planet of the Spiders. 2010’s The Hungry Earth had been a fun and largely traditional Doctor Who story, and coming after three low-key episodes introducing the programme and its conceits and new characters for a casual or returning audience, Arachnids in the UK sounded like it might be a bit of a romp too.

It wasn’t quite. Being broadcast so close to Hallowe’en, this was presumably written to be ‘the spooky one’, and in that sense it perhaps works better if you’re an arachnophobe. The spider effects were, if not always 100% convincing, then certainly as good as anything of the kind the series has previously achieved, and once the regulars got holed up in the hotel from whence the ‘invasion’ had evolved, there was plenty of scope for a bit of Jack Nicholson-esque cabin fever.

Instead we had Mr Big, Chris Noth, not so much BOSS as simply ‘a Boss’ (or the Boss, if he gets his way regarding the American Presidency), and this return to Sheffield felt a little lacking in venom in some quarters, if mostly wholly satisfying in many other respects.

So on the downside, then, there were some tonal inconsistencies, especially in the characterisation. Noth’s wannabe world leader Jack Robertson, while as well-performed as you might expect, seemed at times to be playing in a different production to the rest of the cast, with lots of big reactions and some very ostentatiously comic ones. Thus it was hard to adjust to his more serious moments – and nobody did seem to be taking him seriously, despite his similarities with a certain actual world leader. Although maybe that was the point. Tanya Fear’s Dr. Jade McIntyre, despite being rather crucial to the plot, appeared to have been beamed in from exposition central, and the game was given away almost as soon as she opened her mouth; on the upside, she did take on some of the explaining that Jodie Whittaker has hitherto been burdened with, and the Doctor felt that much more natural this week because of it.

And if the title of this week’s episode suggested an instalment that wasn’t going to take itself too seriously, that was only partly true. There were some very funny moments, and both the way Ryan resolved the more immediate problem and Robertson’s solution to any kind of problem were hilarious, and nicely pertinent to one another. But the production seemed to find it difficult coping with the rapid changes in tone, and sometimes the comedy undercut the peril rather than underpinning it, with some of the message of the episode feeling a little insincerely delivered as a result.

On the other hand, this episode covered quite a lot of more thoughtful, sometimes rather meaningful, ground, and often with a great deal of subtlety or consideration. If the pollution in The Green Death was the by-product of a computer with a power trip and that needed to be dealt with, here we discovered the contamination of the spiders was being caused by an avoidance of responsibility, a willingness to put profit above accountability and an acceptance of cutting corners to cut costs; the modern world in a nutshell. That Robertson appeared to simply walk away scot-free at the end of the episode wasn’t the oversight it might first have seemed; this was just another example of power overriding other concerns, and an illustration – perhaps even a sort of warning – that until we change the rules in order to punish those who deem themselves above the law, this sort of thing will simply continue to happen.

Not that such a message was delivered on-screen, necessarily – but it was there to be taken, in a series that’s reconfigured itself for a broader audience but is still capable of sneaking in (and sometimes not so sneakily) little observations about the state of the planet, and more particularly its politics and politicians.

It was also good to see as logical a use of the location as there was a rational cause and explanation for the threat.

The regulars were brilliantly served this week too. The scenes between Bradley Walsh and Sharon D. Clarke as Graham began to come to terms with his grief were beautifully handled, the kind of thing Doctor Who has dealt with before in recent years, but disentangled from the science fiction – Steven Moffat preferred to resolve this stuff as part of the ongoing fantasy – in a way that felt completely new to the programme. And these scenes were kept just separate enough to live on their own, while ultimately playing a major part of the relationship building between Graham and Ryan (and ultimately the decision to keep on travelling that we closed on). If Walsh has become very much the heart of Series Eleven, Tosin Cole was this week quite brilliant too, by turns – and with consistency – internalising and externalising his character beats in believable and realistic ways. Mandip Gill was also excellent, and while she’s very much emotionally the minor player among the foursome so far, this week she was given much more to do and she accomplished it all with a lightness that is going to prove fundamental to the balance of the team. Some of the early scenes, as the TARDIS landed and we very gradually acquainted ourselves with being back home, the investigation very slowly taking over the narrative, were a joy to watch.

Jodie Whittaker’s quite a joy to watch too, and not because she’s nailing being the Doctor yet. She’s still getting there, and there’s neither a reason to doubt that she will nor any question that she’s right for the part. But the disconnection between Whittaker playing the Doctor and Whittaker being the Doctor is still niggling at the edges of the performance, and it’s fun to see the journey she’s undergoing.

Arachnids in the UK was meat-and-potatoes Doctor Who, an ostensibly lightweight little story told simply and designed – as the rest of Series 11 has been – to be accessible by anyone, whether inured in sci-fi in general and the series in particular or not. And while that means that for those of us already hardwired into the programme, it’s currently behaving a little like Doctor Who’s occasionally lecturing, yet still rather basic infant school teacher. That’s taking some getting used to, and it feels a bit like being told to finish your greens when you’ve already got your eye on the dessert. But there’s a lot of worthwhile stuff in there – and it’s all still new enough that there’s no predicting quite what we’ll be getting next.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 4: “ARACHNIDS IN THE UK” / WRITER: CHRIS CHIBNALL / DIRECTOR: SALLIE APRAHAMIAN / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, CHRIS NOTH, SHOBNA GULATI / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED OCTOBER 28TH)

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 3: ‘ROSA’

There were moments when it was a bit clunky, but Series Eleven’s first window onto history presented a rather crucial moment in the American civil rights movement without undermining Rosa Parks’ boldness or her resolve – in fact Malorie Blackman and Chris Chibnall were very careful to show her coming to her moment of decision quite independently of the rest of the plot – and without making the episode feel so much of a history lesson it rather missed its purpose.

And what was its purpose? This was segregation being illustrated not for an American audience, who ought to have been learning this stuff at school, but for the series’ domestic British one – and not to show how far we’ve come, but, in this modern era of exclusion and a focus on people’s differences rather than their commonalities, to show how far we still have to go. There might be a black man and a ‘Mexican’ travelling on the TARDIS this year, but sadly there was still an outcry from a certain quarter of the programme’s fandom about what an unnecessarily inclusive agenda this was promoting. Well, you don’t make progress without smashing a few status quo.

It was helpful that Rosa didn’t feature an alien intervention, although Krasko’s purpose in travelling back to 1955 served to make the episode even more relevant in 2018. Here was a white man from the future trying to undo over half a century’s worth of progress towards the establishment of equality, and that couldn’t have been more pertinent. We live at a time when it seems to be more attractive to look backwards than ahead, but Doctor Who at least showed that if you are going to become fixated on the past, there are worthwhile things to become fascinated by. We are, after all, supposed to learn from our mistakes as a species as well as individuals, and if there’s a lesson here it’s to not allow the normalisation of hatred to carry the day.

It’s a lesson that Doctor Who has always taught, and this was perhaps its purest expression.

Maybe it’s because that expression was so pure, that some of the rest of the episode felt a little heavy-handed. Blackman and Chibnall were possibly too busy dodging landmines to fill in enough landscape for the regulars to navigate. As sweet as the moment was when the Doctor discovered just how neutered the future bigot had become, that did also rather neuter the peril in the story, and the dashing around to ensure that history might be allowed to take its course felt just a little like running to stand still because of it. It was a well-chosen narrative – the time team protecting a soon-to-be-established state of affairs while most of the people they met were holding onto an old one – but it did make their actions seem rather perfunctory, and lacking in urgency. And while it was absolutely the right decision to show them only protecting the event from the changes that Krasko was seeking to make, rather than taking part in the moment itself, that did have the odd effect of making the series regulars look like bystanders. Bystanders at an historic moment – just as Ian and Barbara so often were – but bystanders nevertheless.

South Africa made a glorious double for the American south, on the other hand, and never has an episode of Doctor Who evoked or presented its location quite so effectively. Segun Akinola’s music was also a great surprise, this week forgoing some of that expensive-sounding programmed electronica for themes which exhibited a more human touch. He’s much lighter on melody than his predecessor was, but there was also a layer that sounded like nothing so much as W.G. Snuffy Walden’s appropriation of stirring American anthems.

And this week finally, finally, the regular team got an opportunity to split up and go off and have their own stories. Partly this was a relief because, beyond the obvious lecturing on history, there was less of the Doctor telling everybody what’s happening and more of them going out and getting involved in it. Bradley Walsh was especially good at making the exposition feel like genuine experience and explanation, and his righteousness when he discovered the part the team would have to play in Rosa’s moment was also well expressed. He’s proving more than his worth this year, giving a really surprising performance filled with depth and authenticity. Mandip Gill is also starting to emerge, ahead of a couple of episodes coming up in which she’ll take closer to centre stage. And Tosin Cole, who’s been almost as much the lead as Jodie Whittaker thus far, was given the best range of reactions to deliver; from his indignation at realising who in where he was, to his delight at meeting Martin Luther King – rightly included, but rightfully kept out of the story itself – Cole made Ryan feel like a regular human being caught up in something bigger than himself, and he was the audience’s touchstone in feeling the history as well as understanding it. Oh, and what a wonderful moment when he sent back to the far past the man from the future who wanted to bring the far past back to the future with him.

Whittaker was vastly improved, less shouty Tennant-lite than last week and more in line with where perhaps she might have developed after The Woman Who Fell to Earth, and giving a decent indication that she’ll find her own Doctor over the course of the rest of the series. There’s a niggling worry that maybe she’s too good an actress for the role, which generally requires less method than it does manner. Once she stops trying to play the Doctor and just starts being her, she’ll be the definite article. She’s not there yet, and she seemed to struggle with some of the episode’s more confrontational moments – it might be that she needs to further adopt Patrick Troughton’s approach to dealing with her enemies, guiling them into being outwitted rather than trying to overpower them – but the promise is there and she had some great moments of Doctor-ish unpredictability this week.

Chris Chibnall seems to be approaching Series Eleven as an opportunity to go back to 1963 and build the programme up from those original blocks once again. This year’s Doctor Who has so far been as much an edification as it has an adventure, the closest the revived series has got to Verity Lambert’s original aspiration towards sincerity, awareness and understanding. Rosa was The Aztecs with a little bit of sci-fi, and 55 years’ worth of advancement in entertainment, what Lambert’s Doctor Who might have been if it had been as much about improving people as well as educating them – and if The Daleks hadn’t come along and skewed it towards distraction. This was Doctor Who with A Message instead of just a lesson, and it imparted that message with just about enough lightness to get it across without it feeling declamatory.

And the song was a nice touch. Not just for what it represents, but because it’s another example of the series being unsatisfied with toeing its own format. Rosa was Doctor Who wanting to be something more than just Doctor Who, and if it didn’t quite succeed in being Doctor Who as well, it was nevertheless a very worthwhile extension to the programme’s limits.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 3: ‘ROSA’ / WRITER: MALORIE BLACKMAN, CHRIS CHIBNALL / DIRECTOR: MARK TONDERAI / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, VINETTE ROBINSON, JOSHUA BOWMAN, TREVOR WHITE / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED OCTOBER 21ST)

DOCTOR WHO – Series 11 Episode 2,The Ghost Monument

The natural end to last week’s opening episode of the Thirteenth Doctor’s first series, might have been the moment she’s finally reunited with her TARDIS after having fallen to Earth. New showrunner Chris Chibnall opted to close on a ‘lost in space’ cliffhanger instead, delaying that reveal of the new design and interior until the end of the second episode. An explicable choice – spreading the unveiling of everything and everyone that’s new or updated across two episodes, rather than cramming it all into the first (and leaving the curtain-raiser to concentrate almost entirely on the characters rather than the ephemera) – but a decision that does rather leave The Ghost Monument (the second episode in a row to be named after one of Doctor Who’s permanent fixtures) in a bit of limbo.

Chibnall’s slant on the series is beginning to emerge, and this is perhaps where this second episode suffers slightly. His predisposition seems to be towards asking what the audience might expect at any given point, and then giving them something rather different, while compensating for the choice – for those viewers who prefer to be spoon-fed their family drama, perhaps – by over-explaining what’s happening right in front of them. So here, where a simple tale of good versus evil might have been the norm, we have a Steven Moffat-esque story about a race in space, where there aren’t really any bad guys at all – and just in case that leaves us a little confused (it probably doesn’t, but just in case) here’s the Doctor to explain absolutely every last little detail about what’s going on. There’s a real crossing point being navigated by wanting to create a version of Doctor Who that delights and surprises, and not wanting to leave any member of the audience scratching his or her head in confusion (the most common complaint about Chibnall’s predecessor, after all).

Sadly, this leaves Jodie Whittaker’s performance a little exposed; like Ewan McGregor acting against a green screen in The Phantom Menace, Whittaker spends so much time telling us what’s going to happen next, asking questions on our behalf just so we don’t miss needing them answered, or explaining how all the sci-fi works, it’s almost like every time she opens her mouth she’s talking to the entire guest cast at once – and the viewer at home – rather than actually, you know, interacting with the people around her. When she gets the occasional quiet moment, she shines, but for 75% of The Ghost Monument she’s pitching her performance somewhere just off the picture, and that was a little distracting. Because while she’s mastered Tennant’s art of following the thought processes as they jump around here, there and everywhere, she hasn’t yet found her own way of stopping and letting the charm ooze out, quite the way the tenth Doctor did. Tennant’s best moments were when he stopped talking, and just let his face reel you in; Whittaker hasn’t found her ‘Doctor face’ yet, maybe.

The story itself was fine, if a little lacking in urgency; the photography and music might be lush in new ways for the programme, but neither seems light enough to follow when the script calls for the episode to be a romp. And this probably should have been as frothy and as engaging as The End of the World, rather than as gleamingly glacial as Smile. I guess the planet’s not called Desolation for nothing.

South Africa did look splendid though.

There were plenty of indications as to where the series might be heading. The regulars were kept moving on the spot, suggesting a development across all ten episodes; while previous showrunners have given us fully-formed characters from the off and then explored what TARDIS-travel means for them, Chibnall patently prefers his Broadchurch approach of allowing us into their worlds just a little at a time. And this Doctor isn’t going to be as portent-free as the pre-publicity might have suggested; the “abandoned and unknown Timeless Child” isn’t something that’s not going to come back and haunt her by episode ten, and Stenza turned out to be behind not just the plot this week, but the ethnic cleansing on Susan Lynch’s character’s home planet too. A case of just using what you already had in your pocket, or setting something up to be further explored in episodes to come? We’ll see.

We also had another mogul in the form of Art Malik, to go with last week’s swindling monarch. There’s a minor theme of power without responsibility developing, perhaps.

There was a lot to enjoy in The Ghost Monument. Despite the overreaching, Jodie Whittaker feels very much like a Doctor-in-waiting – she just needs to settle down a bit after last week’s enthusiastic debut. And with a little more actual bonding, the likeable regular cast will be terrific. There’s no question there’s an imagination behind the programme, and we’ll see how that manifests itself over the course of the coming weeks. Now that the TARDIS is back – the new set’s a bit spartan and yet paradoxically over-decorated – we can hopefully get down to the business of being Doctor Who … and the feeling of ‘the same but different’ can be allowed to stretch into areas where the series excels, rather than hanging around its fringes. So far it’s all felt a bit well-meaning but overly wholesome; it’s time to break out the sparkle now please.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 2: “THE GHOST MONUMENT” / WRITER: CHRIS CHIBNALL / DIRECTOR: MARK TONDERAI / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, SUSAN LYNCH, SHAUN DOOLEY, ART MALIK / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED OCTOBER 14TH)

DOCTOR WHO – Series 11 Episode 1, The Woman Who Fell To Earth

The eleventh series of Doctor Who landed on our screens not with a bang or a whimper, but rather more discreetly than anyone could have anticipated – although given this is the programme reimagined by the creator of Broadchurch, that shouldn’t have been a surprise. The alien menace looked like something from The Sarah Jane Adventures while the look and tone of the instalment were more from the Torchwood end of the extended universe, but the episode itself was much quieter than either Rose or The Eleventh Hour, a 63-minute introduction to the new characters that took its time letting us get to know them, doing so very slowly and deliberately. This is Doctor Who being repurposed for a broader audience and at times it felt like Doctor Who with its teeth removed.

The good news is that Jodie Whittaker looks like she’s going to make a great Doctor. From moment one she owned the dialogue and the character’s quirks – so much for the lack of idiosyncrasy – with the energy and unpredictability of David Tennant, although thankfully without the tenth Doctor’s particular vocal habits. Whittaker looks supremely comfortable in the Doctor’s skin, and it’s going to be a lot of fun watching her engage with the series’ diversity of narrative across the next ten weeks. She already feels fully formed.

The same can’t be said for the other three regulars, and deliberately so. Chibnall has brought together a TARDIS team – and saved the moment we see them enter the ship, very wisely in an already packed episode, presumably for next week – with a lot of room for growth, at the head of a run of episodes that looks like it’ll take a much more traditional, almost serialised, approach to character development than is generally the case with Doctor Who. For the last thirteen years we’ve always felt we know the new regulars by the end of episode one, whereas The Woman Who Fell to Earth ended with us still asking who the new team are and how they’ll cope – although fortunately Chibnall hasn’t taken the early 1980s route and made them unwilling fellow travellers; one thing we have seen is that this team are going to bond well together, and that’s hugely promising. This also feels like the beginning of a period where the narratives will involve the characters, rather than revolving around them, a touch more than has been the case.

Despite appearing to be third in the pecking order, the way the episode ended called upon Bradley Walsh’s star quality and his scene in the chapel was immensely affecting. He’s far from playing a straight man, but much less of a comedy buffer than we might have anticipated. He’s the least appropriate TARDIS traveller we’ve had in a while though, somewhere between Rory and Wilf but much more authentic feeling than either, so it’ll be fascinating to see where his character takes us. Tosin Cole was our entry point – for this week at least – and like Mandip Gill was strong and sympathetic and believable; they’re both very likeable actors but we’re seeing the beginnings of their journeys, and you can tell there’s a lot more to come from each. Despite the moment of heroism each of the principals is called upon to perform, despite the resolve each of the regulars needs to find, you feel there’s a lot further for them all to travel.

The story, while perfectly serviceable, wasn’t the most inspired (Predator in South Yorkshire, essentially, although it was nice to see the Doctor giving the creature itself as much grief as she did) – and that’s not inappropriate for an opening episode. It was probably a bit grimmer and more gruesome than the promotional materials led us to expect, and being almost entirely centred around a night shoot a lot physically darker too, so it isn’t as much of a lurch out of the Peter Capaldi era as the talk of starting over might have indicated. In fact more than anything The Woman Who Fell to Earth felt like a Russell T Davies script being executed by the Steven Moffat production regime, and it doesn’t quite feel like Chris Chibnall’s stamp has been left on the programme just yet, although the same was largely true of The Eleventh Hour. That said, this maybe felt a bit too dark, a bit too grim, for the Sunday evening timeslot – but all that might change with next week’s episode anyway, of course.

There was a sense, however, of this being Doctor Who shorn of the showrunner’s personality; both Russell T Davies’ and Steven Moffat’s iterations were clearly the work of those highly distinctive writers, whereas The Woman Who Fell to Earth felt like the writer adapting himself to Doctor Who rather than the other way around. The benefits of this are twofold. On the one hand, this is much more in line with the classic series approach, whereby hindsight might allow us to spot the work of particular writers but the overall effect is of a more generic ongoing narrative. The other benefit of this is that it’s less off-putting to the kind of casual viewer who’s less inclined to stick with something distinct if it’s not tailored specifically to his or her tastes. We might be about to enter the most inclusive era of modern Doctor Who yet. Whether audiences will flock to it is to be determined; the opening night’s viewing figure was certainly beyond any realistic prediction of its size.

The downside is that this doesn’t feel as authored, and therefore there’s less to distinguish it from the rank and file of other television (monsters and alien planets notwithstanding) than in the last two iterations of the programme. This might be a period that will be liked by a lot more people, but ends up being loved by fewer.

The absence of a singular authorial voice also throws the spotlight more on the production itself, with mixed but promising results. Segun Akinola’s theme arrangement felt a touch too manufactured on first listen, lacking the organic feel of Murray Gold’s first few attempts, and the incidental music too being so rhythmically based didn’t have the ebb and adaptability of what we’d become used to. It’s not as emotionally prominent, but instead of dictating ‘the feels’ it rather imposes a pace and rhythm on the tone of the programme. The new cameras – while giving Doctor Who a visual sheen that removes it completely from any question of looking like a television production – also rob it of that slightly cartoonishness that has helped make the last thirteen years such a remarkable experience. This is a programme that looks and sounds more like its influences and aspirations than at any point since 1977.

It also had a cliffhanger straight out of Doctor Who’s very first episode in 1963 (with added, and probably easily fixed, space jeopardy), the new regulars stolen out of their lives against their better wishes. The ‘you will be watching’ sequence was a rather odd alteration though, presumably meaning we won’t be seeing ‘next time’ trailers at the end of forthcoming episodes. But it very much fit in with the pre-series promotion, emphasising characters and actors over threats and environments.

All in all, this was an unexpectedly moderate introduction to the new regime, making it hard to tell which aspects – beyond the weight placed on the acting and characterisation – will become more prominent as the series unravels. This was no classic restructuring the way Spearhead from Space was, but it’s not as potentially polarising to a mainstream the way Castrovalva or Deep Breath might have been either. We won’t know the true value of The Woman Who Fell to Earth for some weeks yet, but it was entertaining and agreeable and filled with suggestions of things we might yet come to fall in love with. The casting of the four regulars is its single best aspect; they’re perfect.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 1: THE WOMAN WHO FELL TO EARTH / WRITER: CHRIS CHIBNALL / DIRECTOR: JAMIE CHILDS / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, SHARON D. CLARKE, SAMUEL OATLEY / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED OCTOBER 7TH)

RAWHEAD REX (1986)

Cult horror, demon, monster movie Rawhead Rex is brought in glorious clarity to home screens from Arrow Video.

A film watched on grainy videos in living rooms by children too young to have been allowed, Rawhead Rex has its own small following. He may not be as recognisable to the general public as Frankenstein’s monster, It or Freddy Kreuger, but there are those that hold Rex to their heart. But are there going to be more as they find this new release?

In rural Ireland, a farmer topples an intrusive stone that stands in one of his fields. Unknowingly, he’s broken the prison of the demon Rawhead Rex (Heinrich von Schellendorf). Now free, Rex wreaks violent havoc over the town. This means it’s a bad time for American historian Howard Hallenbeck (David Dukes) and his family to be staying there.

Adapted from a short story from horror fiction legend Clive Barker, from one of his Books of Blood collections, Rawhead Rex greatly benefits from actually having Clive Barker on board, adapting his own story into a screenplay. It’s his mischievous touch that gives the film a lot of its entertainment, from Rex golden showers to amusing lines of dialogue. The other component that helps keep the film hanging together is lead actor David Dukes. His committed performance and strong acting skills actually manage to sell a lot of what’s going on, even when Rawhead Rex himself doesn’t.

Speaking of Rawhead, he hasn’t managed to weather the changes that have occurred. Physically imposing with his statuesque height and bulging muscles, he sports a strong 1980’s mullet, a twitching snout and eyes that struggle to focus on the same thing. But it is part of the fun.

It’s difficult to say Rawhead Rex is a strong film. It certainly struggles with the passage of time and we don’t think many modern viewers will add it to their frequent watch list, but it will give those who saw it thirty years ago, and its cult following, a lot of enjoyment.

The adaptation that is Rawhead Rex actually displeased Clive Barker so much that he decided to direct an adaptation of one of his stories himself. That film was Hellraiser. So Rawhead Rex is actually a lot more influential in horror cinema than you might have thought.

The Blu-ray release itself is from Arrow Video so it’s all as you would expect: a flawless 4K restoration from the original camera negative backed up by a wealth of extras including interviews with cast and crew, a commentary with the director and featurettes.

RAWHEAD REX (1986) / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: GEORGE PAVLOU / SCREENPLAY: CLIVE BARKER / STARRING: DAVID DUKES, KELLY PIPER, HUGH O’CONOR, CORA VENUS LUNNY / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

BEYOND THE WOODS

A somewhat dysfunctional group of young friends unite for a weekend of serious drinking, recreational drug-taking and ill-advised sexual liaisons in a cottage in an unnamed wooded expanse of the Irish countryside. Those in the party hoping to enjoy some fresh country air are disappointed as the whole area is mired in the noxious stench of sulphur, released from a sinkhole newly-formed nearby. As tensions within the party rise, a growing sense of ill-ease and foreboding mounts as the residence comes under the scrutiny of a mysterious and macabre spectre skulking in the trees.

Writer-director Sean Breathnach’s first full-length feature bears many of the hallmarks of the ‘cabin in the woods’ genre, but this is far from being a homage to the folk-horror tradition. Instead, this is the tale of a bunch of rather self-absorbed thirty-somethings who, preoccupied with their own problems and distracted by the escapism on offer on this mini-break, initially fail to recognise the seriousness of their worsening predicament.

Low-budget horror filmmaking needs to pitch ambitions that it can deliver on, and it’s one of the disappointments of Beyond the Woods that, while the demonic sinkhole is referenced throughout the movie, it is never seen on screen (the action keeps close to the cottage and the neighbouring trees). In conjuring up the mostly-unseen threat, the script throws together a slew of bizarre occurrences, supernatural motifs and slasher set-pieces that never properly cohere. The finale pivots on a never-before-mentioned premise that should have been introduced in the second act, and an inexplicable about-turn in one character’s moral code.

But if things fall a little short in the storytelling, the film does not come off entirely like a wet weekend in County Wicklow. Breathnach recognises the importance of establishing and fleshing out his characters so that those who are later thrown into peril are not simply cyphers. The young ensemble cast invests the lengthy sections of semi-improvised dialogue in the early scenes with an unhurried sense of naturalism. Amongst the group, Irene Kelleher, as the put-upon but resilient Lucy, Ruth Hayes as the conflicted host Marissa, and John Ryan Howard as the emotionally wounded Ger, stand out.

The cinematography is also well executed throughout, both in the cramped interiors of the cottage and in the dense surrounding woodland. The crisp musical soundscape helps to offset the sometimes muddy audio of the group scenes. And while the monster’s physical appearance is derivative, the creature still makes some effective on-screen entrances.

Crowdfunded calling-card movies are a fantastic entry point for new cinematic talent, and there is much in Beyond the Woods that showcases the creative capabilities of those involved. The on-screen execution (if you’ll forgive the pun) is better than many of the movie’s minimal-budget contemporaries. But more time could usefully have been spent in the pre-production phase, sharpening the script and tightening up the logic of the film’s would-be folklore.

BEYOND THE WOODS / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: SEAN BREATHNACH / STARRING: ROSS MACMAHON, JOHN RYAN HOWARD, MARK LAWRENCE, IRENE KELLEHER / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

DOCTOR WHO Christmas Special 2017 ‘Twice Upon a Time’

And so the time to bid farewell to not just Peter Capaldi’s twelfth Doctor, but also Steven Moffat’s showrunnership has arrived. Except the funny thing is, we already did that in The Doctor Falls – until Moffat realised we wouldn’t be getting a Christmas Special this year unless he was able to somehow extend Capaldi’s regeneration story into a discrete third episode six months down the line from the second, hence this unique and ostensibly somewhat bizarre coda to Series Ten. Does it work? As a Doctor Who story, probably not; the jeopardy, such as it is – and it would have been very difficult and rather destabilising to suddenly give the twelfth Doctor a brand new threat to deal with just as he’s on the point of regeneration – barely exists, and even then only in order to tell us something we of course already know, but given that we’ve been provided with an opportunity to look under the bonnet of Doctor Who in a way we’re not generally accustomed to doing, Twice Upon a Time at least tries to disguise itself as a story in its own right.

Make no mistake, this is a twelfth Doctor story with a guest cast that includes the first Doctor, not a first Doctor story that happens to have the twelfth in it. And like the War Doctor in The Day of the Doctor, the guest Doctor comes with a little baggage but ultimately proves to be there for a reason. Whereas the War Doctor allowed fans of the classic series to look at the revival and say, ‘You’re like this now?!’, here the first Doctor instead allows fans of the revival to look back at where Doctor Who came from and say, ‘Things used to be like this?!’ And that may have been overstated a little on occasion, but it was really a very minor part of Twice Upon a Time and it wasn’t what the first Doctor was there for.

The first Doctor, far from being the gilding on a Steven Moffat’s last episode, was actually a crucial part of proceedings. Capaldi’s twelfth was the Doctor who inherited the new regeneration cycle that Matt Smith was presented with, and so here was a Doctor who – as we have seen – has spent much of his existence questioning who he is. He’s a character who, inside the fiction, should not have existed and thus was immersed in a deep existential angst. A character who, when it gets to the end and it’s time for his Time Lord life to renew itself once again, allows that angst to explode outwardly into a decision to stop this new cycle before any further unbidden Doctors can be born. A Doctor who thought he was done with changing before he even got to be this Doctor, and who therefore no longer wants to continue.

The mirror onto this decision comes when he’s faced with his very first incarnation on the eve of his very first regeneration, a man who admits privately – to himself, of course – how frightened he is of what he will become. Not that he fears the new person will be so very different from the one who he is replacing, but maybe simply that this new person won’t really be him any longer. It’s a very intelligent switch; the twelfth gets to show the first not just how important change is to the universe in general, but also how important the Doctor is to ensuring that universe is safely allowed to continue changing. It’s in the twelfth Doctor going through the motions of what the first Doctor will become, that the first Doctor gets to see why he must become that person – which is not to say that he’s not already a good deal of the way there – and it’s in the going through of those motions that the twelfth Doctor gets to see why the universe (and the television audience) would miss him if he stopped doing it. This was the perfect opportunity for a writer who revels in holding a mirror up to the characters and series and reflecting them back upon themselves, to devote an entire episode to such an enterprise and not have it feel unwarranted.

In part, it’s because Steven Moffat tends to write plots that echo the stories he’s telling that Twice Upon a Time isn’t quite the dramatic send-off that Capaldi and his Doctor might have deserved. There is no alien invasion, mad scientist or malfunctioning technology here, rather the technology is working perfectly fine and, as Capaldi’s Doctor tells us, he doesn’t know what to do when there’s no evil plan. That’s not Moffat’s problem, as the narrative is here to reflect and inform the characters, and the Testimony manages to do so in that very Steven Moffat manner wherein you barely even notice how cleverly the pieces are knitting together. This is a story that reinforces that very regeneration-based idea that it’s not who you are on the outside that’s important, but that as long as you’re the sum of your actions, you can still be who you have always been – in spite of appearances and in spite of huge external change.

Moffat also uses the Testimony to address his own past – not the only time he does so during the episode. Having left both Bill and Clara’s departures open-ended, the two companions’ reappearances as “Memory Glass” confirms both that Clara really did return to die at Trap Street and, because the last thing she remembers of life was of being with Puddle Girl, Bill never did get home in one piece. Furthermore, the Doctor’s refusal to accept these downloaded memories as the real thing, takes us back to River Song’s death in her very first story, and confirms that the River who lives on as a Data Ghost isn’t really River, simply a memory of who River was. There’s a bittersweet undercurrent to all of this, a recognition that the process of regeneration that sustains Doctor Who isn’t just about the oncoming Doctor, but about the outgoing actor for whom we will no longer be able to enjoy new adventures. The new incarnation might be tremendously exciting to anticipate – never more so than here, of course – but the old one is, insofar as the series and the fiction is concerned, properly dead.

Moffat’s hall of mirrors reflects this angle of the story back yet again by including as its seasonal element the 1914 Christmas Armistice, whereat for a brief moment hostilities were put on hold before recommencing the following day – crucially at a point whereby the faceless enemies of both sides of the conflict had developed a face and a voice. The recognition of life, death and regeneration run through Twice Upon a Time like a rash.

That’s also why the Brigadier’s grandfather is the perfect foil for the two Doctors, another example of the future being the past that becomes that future, the cyclical, paradoxical storytelling of Steven Moffat never more fitting than in this conjunction between Moffat’s sensibilities and Doctor Who’s mechanics. After fifty-odd years, repetition and renewal have become ingrained in the series’ mythology, and repetition and renewal are the by-words for Moffat’s approach to scriptwriting. This episode is almost painfully self-appropriate.

It is such an incredible shame, then, that in spite of performances from all concerned – not just the actors, but the director, the production designer, everybody – that are treating the material with every ounce of respect and enthusiasm they can muster, Twice Upon a Time feels ultimately somewhat tired, and perhaps an episode too many. The author’s snappy, 1940s-style movie dialogue is in short supply (and what humour there is, and there’s plenty, feels just that bit forced – which is the real issue with the interplay between Bradley and Capaldi, rather than the assumed sexism that was simply an exaggeration of something that was always a latent ingredient of a character created four years prior to the Summer of Love), and while Moffat has successfully told stories that don’t rely on such humour before, without the crackle of energy the screwball element of Moffat’s plots provides, the narrative is robbed of any urgency and almost grinds itself into not feeling like it matters.

As legacy episodes go, this certainly wasn’t either Capaldi’s or Moffat’s best work – maybe the low-key performance from Capaldi earned him his extended goodbye, doubling as a welcome to the incoming Doctor, although the off-centre but recognisable Bradley first Doctor quickly made comparisons with William Hartnell moot – but as an experiment in texture and content by which to sign off, it’s one that future generations of Doctors, writers and fans will never forget.

Steven Moffat’s first televised Doctor Who was a loving pastiche of the past surrounding a restatement of the series’ credo ahead of a revival that was, back then, no more than the glimmer of a possibility. Here he did the same thing ahead of a certain change that might leave viewers wondering if this is still going to be the same programme; it is, Moffat tells us, very much so. And he proves it by – particularly in the case of the regeneration itself – wrapping Twice Upon a Time up in a deferent, respectful and yet still metatextual inclusion of the first Doctor’s actual regeneration. Very nicely played.

As to Jodie Whittaker, the future will decide whether she’s a worthy successor to one of our greatest Doctors. But her “Oh brilliant” was delivered in a manner that suggested the tenth Doctor’s sense of wonder with none of the attendant ego or self-knowingness, and the suggestion of a quirky first female Doctor (a quirkiness in that line that immediately banished any notion of gender comparisons) harkens back to the very first “replacement” Doctor, Patrick Troughton. Which is, of course, where we came in. Even in the heat of the showrunning handover, the appropriateness of every beat of this story prevails. Maybe time will be kinder to it once such a curate’s egg of an episode has had enough opportunity not to feel so very different.

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 12: “THE DOCTOR FALLS”

After an entire 45-minute Doctor Who episode concerned with waiting, here comes another one. Only this week, with fifteen minutes’ extra waiting – and four extra characters to do the waiting.

The Doctor Falls took the premise of the previous Doctor’s regeneration story, The Time of the Doctor, to a whole new level. In Matt Smith’s final story, he found a reason to stay and live out his last life in the service of protecting the people of a planet we viewers at home had no particular reason to care about, knowing his life was coming to an end. It was an episode about what happens to the Doctor when he “retires”, and how the universe – and his companion – won’t let him. The Doctor Falls took each of these elements and shifted them about in some way. Peter Capaldi’s twelfth Doctor once again took a stand – “I do what I do because it’s right, it’s decent. And above all, because it’s kind,” he tells the two Masters in the episode’s signature scene, one that’s undermined a little by the Doctor’s assertion that to do so “hardly ever works”, when for fifty-odd years we’ve been watching him actually saving the day, actually “winning” – as the Masters themselves should have experienced often enough. It’s a statement about who the Doctor is and what he does that might have been more powerful if we hadn’t heard it before, but that just about works because of who his audience is this time around. And this time around, the Doctor was making his speech as he faced finally going into the good night (and not for the first time either), having stuck around not for retirement but for, presumably, guilt. It had been his hubris – or perhaps his over-reliance on Missy (and the final irony was that he never got to hear her repaying his trust) – that had got him, and Bill, and Missy, and Nardole, into this mess, so here he was planting his feet firmly on the ground and accepting his culpability, as well as the punishment, the ultimate self-sacrifice, that was going to come his way.

Which meant the episode was filled with great dramatic – and comedic – performances, and lots of character moments that made the waiting worthwhile. But it did kill all of the episode’s momentum stone dead, to the point where The Doctor Falls became a sequence of terribly long scenes – beautifully, cinematically shot by Rachel Talalay – that reinforced things we already knew about the characters, without really adding very much that we didn’t.

Nardole, for example, gets to stay on the ship and potentially either nobly sacrifice himself in the cause of slowing down the Cybermen’s inexorable march to the top, or else save the day with a little bit of Doctor-like genius, of the kind the Doctor has patently not been exhibiting this week. It wasn’t a destination that made sense of the character, although it did highlight the Doctor’s insistence on sacrificing himself as just that, a deliberate choice, rather than a last option. Remote-detonating a bomb shouldn’t have been beyond the skills of someone as quick-thinking and tech-literate as we saw the Doctor being earlier in the episode. The Doctor’s choice for death was a bit like standing in front of a door and not being able to open it all over again, something the character we know ought to easily have been able to do. Especially after he’d given such a beautiful speech about making a difference.

Similarly Bill’s story, while heart-breaking and despite having been seen before, made less sense of Bill’s narrative than it did the Doctor’s decision. On a number of occasions this year, Bill has been witness to events rather than proactive in them (Oxygen springs immediately to mind, for several reasons), and that’s fair enough; the Doctor should be doing the legwork and the companion should be throwing in where they can. But the line “Where there’s a tear, there’s hope” should have signalled a kick-start in trying to find a solution, rather than merely being a pre-empting of an otherwise fairly spurious resurrection for the character at the end of the episode. The return of Heather as the Pilot was well signalled and emotionally satisfactory, and indeed the means by which the Doctor was also able to be resurrected, but where was she in the final moments of last week’s episode? In the cold light of day, it’s a manipulation that services necessary plot developments rather than being an integral part of their construction.

The inclusion of the two Masters was also anything but essential to the plot, such as it was. It isn’t even clear just how much input the Simm Master had in the development of the Cybermen, and other than the timing, his responsibility in Bill’s conversion lies more in his claims of it rather than any obvious practical involvement. Simm however was magnificent, moustache-curlingly evil without a hint of campery; this is a Master we could happily have seen a lot more of – and it would have been lovely to see him doing something with this characterisation too, beyond of course being the bearer of bad news.

Missy’s story, this series’ arc lest we forget, came to a satisfying climax – “It’s time to stand with the Doctor” a fantastic moment of proper character development, one that we’d witnessed happening and that felt real, natural and earned. And sadly rather wasted; the irony of her realisation being also the moment of her ending was entirely inevitable, but the potential it unlocked will sadly now remain elusive, something to imagine rather than to enjoy. The two Masters made a great double act, easily worthy of the expectations placed upon a finale. It’s a shame they weren’t given something creative to get involved in, as their interactions were as static as they were electrifying.

Equally static was Peter Capaldi, a superlative presence but one who, through injury and resolve, had less light to balance with his shades of determined single-mindedness this week. This was his Androzani, his Logopolis even, and while the Doctor’s culpability made his intransigence logical, it robbed us of the lightness of touch that has charmed us through much of Series Ten.

The Doctor Falls was the story of three Time Lords and two part-humans locked in a prison of their own determination, with none of them showing much of an imperative to find an escape route. It began with an example of Moffat’s sinister creativity in the pre-titles sequence – we might have seen “living” scarecrows before but here it was the why rather than the what that was so chilling – but beyond that point, there was little to genuinely surprise. Your appreciation of it will depend upon what you want from your Doctor Who; emotionally it was resonant and in terms of character development it was fulfilling, but coming after Hell Bent, which managed to smuggle its rewards into a rich and comprehensive metaphorical sci-fi plot, the Series Ten finale saw Moffat throwing the switch back so far in the other direction, it was the simplicity itself that was the surprise. Overall, as a two-parter, this will be among Moffat’s better works but perhaps not among his very best.

He has made good on his promise to do something new with the Doctor’s regeneration, however, perhaps justifiably given that we’re at the beginning of a new regeneration cycle. And it feels entirely appropriate that this first “new” Doctor will come to accept the need for change in symmetry with the other first Doctor, facing the prospect entirely without experience of it. Christmas will see Steven Moffat bowing out forging connections between the new and the old, just as he has so often done during his tenure as showrunner.

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 12: “THE DOCTOR FALLS” / DIRECTOR: RACHEL TALALAY / WRITER: STEVEN MOFFAT / STARRING: PETER CAPALDI, PEARL MACKIE, MATT LUCAS, MICHELLE GOMEZ, JOHN SIMM, SAMANTHA SPIRO / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED 1ST JULY)

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 11: “WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME”

He’s a bit like that there Doctor Who – and yes, we think we can call our eponymous character that now – is Steven Moffat. There will be a lot of unnecessary running around, and we will have seen much of what he does before. Hell, we’ll have seen him being the one doing it. There will certainly be an attempt to make sure everybody lives, and there will be a number of rabbits being pulled out of hats – whether expected or not. Oh, and boy he does – despite himself – love a tragedy. A tragedy that he’ll try and manipulate to create something bold, bittersweet and beautiful out of.

We’ll have to wait till next week for that last one.

This was definitely a case of him saving the best until (next to) last, though. Series Ten has felt just a little bit of a plod in getting here; fantastic TARDIS team, but the stories themselves a little too obvious, a little too safe, a little too lacking in colour. World Enough and Time (and by the way, what a brilliant title, one of the series’ best), on the other hand, exploded onto our screens – almost literally, in the pre-titles flash-forward’s case – in a blaze of muffled grey tones and surprisingly reined in performances. Well, but for old Fagin over there at any rate.

This was a case of generating a creeping sense of terror, rather than going for the simple shocks – which were nevertheless all present and correct. Even John Simm’s Mr. Razor, an ostensibly comic creation, existed to engender unease. Whether you spotted who was underneath all that latex or not – and the mask beneath a mask scene was one of the funniest and most disturbingly so jokes this year – his every line and action served to rubber stamp Bill’s fate with a peculiar irony that was quite chilling. In fact, as much as the double cliff-hanger might have been obvious for some (and we’re willing to bet a huge majority of the watching audience didn’t twig one or both of the reveals until they were nearly upon us), it was the sense of inevitability that produced the tension. We saw Bill die. There was a bloody great hole right through the middle of her body – in a shot nicked right out of Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead – so we knew there wasn’t going to be a simple solution in the offering; no easy resurrection here. In fact, it was a good job Jorj waited until the proto-Cybermen had pretty much arrived before pulling the trigger! Moffat’s ethos this year has been, “Here’s what’s going to happen, now sit back and watch us getting there.” Except there was no sitting back this week; everything about World Enough and Time was designed to put the viewer on the edge of their seat. Assuming they weren’t hiding behind it, that is.

In many ways, this was Moffat revisiting some of his earlier two-parters and revising them, approaching their themes or topics from a new angle. Forest of the Dead had given us two mismatched but simultaneous time-lines, The Empty Child had revolved around a creepily half-deserted hospital with scientifically inappropriate patients, and Dark Water had provided an alternative origin story for the Cybermen that had been all about the ultra-deliberate disclosure of detail. Moffat loves to take his favourite themes and find new ways to play with them, though; while the plots might seem familiar – and from Marc Platt’s Spare Parts too, of course – it’s the substance of the stories that marks them as distinct. And this wasn’t really about the Cybermen, any more than Death in Heaven was; this was an aperitif to the main course, the story of Missy’s redemption and the past that comes back – quite literally comes back – to spoil it.

“My name is Doctor Who” was a brilliant scene, a comedy rejoinder to Clara’s entreaty to the Time Lords at the end of The Time of the Doctor, and a bit of a two-fingered salute to the kind of people who worry about these things. It was Missy taking the Doctor’s lifestyle frivolously, before realising the gravity – again quite literally – of what he does. It was an essential way to introduce Missy’s rehabilitation, demonstrating that reformed or not, she still has an exhibitionistic playful side; in fact, if she’d toed the Doctor’s line we’d have been set up to think she was deceiving him. The flashbacks to the Doctor formulating his scheme were equally well conceived, his enthusiasm proving his undoing even as we watched. It’s an obvious Moffat trick but it’s never been better played or more pertinent.

The acting was staggeringly good from everybody on the screen, and with Alison Lintott’s nurse and Paul Brightwell’s surgeon, there was a heightened, Jeunet-esque quality to the horror and the performances that allowed Simm’s Mr. Razor not to seem misplaced. The Master’s disguises have sometimes felt too obvious, but here he was right at home – making him less culpable in his choices and less easy to spot. His scene with Missy was electrifying, and his unmasking hilarious. Terrifying and hysterical at once. We’ve been a long time waiting for an on-screen two Masters story, and Moffat’s apparent choices in what kind of such story would be worth telling appear impeccable.

Was World Enough and Time fan service at the expense of regular viewers? Not at all. Whether Moffat ties the episode in explicitly with The Tenth Planet or not, the concepts and the creepiness still work remarkably well – especially as a sub-texture to Missy’s story – and Moffat has even made some of the hokier aspects of the Cybermen’s debut less absurd along the way. It’s the series’ very first attempt to show us the horror of the creation of the Cybermen, demonstrating – if Dark Water had left us in any doubt – Moffat’s understanding that simply enclosing characters in metal suits doesn’t expose the situation’s full monstrosity. And the substance of the episode was in how it will tie its two plots together; this week we had a thesis on the mechanics of an enforced metamorphosis, which will no doubt foreshadow – as suggested in the cold open – at least one if not several more to come.

World Enough and Time left us with a promise, that the character’s journeys are going to end in painful and complicated, and transmogrifying, ways – that despite the trailer, The Doctor Falls will really be about its people. And, just maybe, that next Saturday we’ll find out who Peter Capaldi’s replacement is going to be. If being blasé about Simm’s return and the Mondas Cybermen has distracted attention away from bigger secrets to be revealed, then wouldn’t that be a thing? Steven Moffat might be about to bow out of Doctor Who with his most comprehensive and fulfilling series finale yet. On this evidence, it has very much been worth the wait.

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 11: “WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME” / DIRECTOR: RACHEL TALALAY / WRITER: STEVEN MOFFAT / STARRING: PETER CAPALDI, PEARL MACKIE, MATT LUCAS, MICHELLE GOMEZ, JOHN SIMM, OLIVER LANSLEY, PAUL BRIGHTWELL / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED 24TH JUNE)