#RTD actually bothering to explain how the Master comes back

[langernameohnebedeutung]

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[the-desolated-quill]

The Name Of The Doctor - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

I remember at the time there was a lot of panic within the fandom. The Name Of The Doctor? Oh God! He wouldn’t! Is Moffat actually going to reveal the Doctor’s real name?! Heresy! Sacrilege! The end of Who is nigh!

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I recognise that was just silly. Of course Moffat isn’t brave enough to reveal the Doctor’s real name. He’s stupid enough, but he’s not brave enough. And in some ways that provides a small comfort. While The Name Of The Doctor is without a shadow of a doubt the worst series finale in the whole of New Who, at least the Doctor’s name has been left untouched.

So the Paternoster Gang, Clara and River Song (yes she’s back again. Sigh) meet up via a hallucinogenic trance to discuss the Doctor. Because it’s always about the Doctor isn’t it? And I want you to bear this in mind as we continue.

So some gibbering serial killer has revealed that ‘the Doctor has a secret that he will take to his grave, and it has been discovered.’ This is soon revealed to be yet more of Moffat’s pretentious bollocks because it turns out the grave has been discovered, not the secret. So why didn’t the serial killer just say ‘the Doctor’s grave has been discovered’? And how the fuck does he even know about it anyway? Did the Great Intelligence tell him? Why didn’t the Great Intelligence talk to the Paternoster Gang directly if he wanted to lure the Doctor to Trenzalore?

This leads me to quite possibly the only thing about this episode I actually liked. The Whisper Men. They never give an explanation for where they came from, but I like them. They’re very creepy. At least at first. Unfortunately as the episode goes along, their threat is diminished dramatically because all they ever seem to do is just stand around hissing at people and spouting stupid nursery rhymes. Also they kill off Jenny, which made me sit bolt upright in my seat as I realised that the characters are actually in danger for once, only for Strax to magically bring her back to life with his remote control. So what was the point of that?

So off we go to Trenzalore to visit the tomb of the Doctor. I have several problems with this. For starters, I really don’t want to see the Doctor’s grave. I think in Moffat’s zeal to massage his own ego and pull the rug out from under our feet, he’s now at serious risk of stripping too much of the Doctor’s mystery away. Also I get why the Doctor would be reluctant to find out where he dies, but how can he possibly avoid information like that? He’s travelled to so many places and helped so many people to the point where he’s become one of the most well known people in the universe. He’s in recorded history. Surely he’s bound to come across the date and circumstances of his own death at some point whether he wants to or not. Besides, haven’t we done this already in Series 6? Why are we doing this again? And if the Doctor was always destined to die at Trenzalore, why bother killing him at Lake Silencio? And if him dying at Lake Silencio is a fixed point, how could he possibly die at Trenzalore? This makes no sense.

Still, at least Trenzalore is nice to look at. There’s some gravestones and a giant TARDIS. Then it gets ruined by yet more Moffat idiocy. Who put the River Song grave secret entrance there? They never explain that. And if this is post Library River Song, I’m not 100% sure how she can be taking part in the Paternoster Gang’s ‘conference call.’ Nor how she and Clara can be communicating with each other when it’s been firmly established you need to be unconscious to make the conference call. I certainly don’t get how in God’s name the Doctor is able to talk to her at the end when he hasn’t even had a whiff of hallucinogen. Truth be told, I haven’t the faintest idea why River Song is even in this. She’s basically there to open the tomb because she’s the only person who knows the Doctor’s real name. Moffat’s ego working overtime yet again. It’s funny how Moffat likes to make fun of RTD’s obsession with Rose when his obsession with River is infinitely worse. I mean I wasn’t too fond of Rose neither, but credit where it’s due, at least Rose was a three dimensional character. River is nothing but a Mary Sue who always has to be better than the Doctor at everything and yet displays no actual character or agency of her own. The fact she apparently made the Doctor tell her his name should tell you everything you need to know about Moffat’s mindset as a writer. The Doctor didn’t tell her because he trusted her. She made him. She’s always the one who has to have an advantage over the Doctor, the title character, because she’s Moffat’s special creation and he wants her to be oh so important without putting in the effort to properly justify it. Plus she’s not really that strong or independent because, like every other female character Moffat has ever written, her life still utterly revolves around the male protagonist. At least one silver lining we can draw from this episode is that it looks like River Song might finally be gone for good at last. Thank God.

Then the Great Intelligence shows up, played by Richard E. Grant, to give us his bullshit evil plot. Apparently when the Doctor died, he left a wound in time that stretches right back to when he was on Gallifrey (I don’t get it either. Just go with it), and now the Great Intelligence wants to use this wound to kill the Doctor because of... reasons.

Now if you’re not familiar with the Great Intelligence, I imagine you must have been pretty confused as to why he hates the Doctor so much. And do you know something? As a die hard Whovian who has seen both the new and classic series multiple times, I’m pretty confused too. Seriously Moffat, out of all the villains you could have picked, why the Great Intelligence? For one thing, his prime motivation has always been to try and find a body. He clearly has a body now, so that’s his motivation gone. And second, why does he hate the Doctor so much that he’d be prepared to kill himself in order to unwrite the Doctor’s entire life? I’m not saying the Great Intelligence and the Doctor don’t have history, but compared to the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master or even the Sontarans, the Great Intelligence seems like a really odd choice. Outside of ‘it’s the 50th anniversary’ I honestly don’t get why the Great Intelligence is the baddie. They don’t even give a good reason for what he’s doing. He’s basically doing it just because he’s evil and killing the Doctor would be an evil thing to do, so he’s going to do it I guess. I don’t even understand how the Great Intelligence is able to unwrite the Doctor’s life. He steps through the wound and then just stands there scowling. And how does Clara manage to stop him in the end? She steps through the wound, multiple versions of her appear throughout the Doctor’s life and then... what? It’s all so vague and utterly moronic.

Sigh. I suppose I can’t put this off any longer. I know @prettycanarynoir and @thealmightytwittytwat have been really looking forward to me tearing Clara’s story arc a new arsehole, so here goes. 

Clara, the impossible girl, was born to save the Doctor. Now the funny thing is I could see this arc actually working (you know? In an alternate universe where Steven Moffat was a long distance lorry driver rather than a showrunner and someone with an actual brain was writing this episode instead). The problems is, like with a lot of Moffat’s idiotic series arcs, the buildup has been so poor. Outside of the Doctor constantly bellowing how impossible she is, there’s no effort to actually explore this or get Clara involved in her own arc. She never finds out about her alternate selves until the very end and she doesn’t so much choose to sacrifice herself for the Doctor rather than be forced into it by circumstance. Clara has the same problem as River. Moffat is determined to make her better and more important than the Doctor, but he never gives her any real character or agency of her own. Just look at the scene where she makes the decision to jump into the wound. Flinging yourself to your death isn’t exactly something you take lightly, is it? But the way Jenna Coleman performs it, you’d think she was just popping off for half an hour to do a spot of bungie jumping. You don’t feel the emotional weight of her sacrifice whatsoever because there is none. Clara isn’t scared or apprehensive or anything. She’s just her usual smug self. She doesn’t behave like an actual person would, and that’s because Clara isn’t a person at all. She’s a plot device. And to make things even worse, despite establishing that once you jump through the wound, there’s no way back and you’ll be lost forever, Moffat once again changes his own rules so that the Doctor can rescue her, thus making her sacrifice completely meaningless. it’s just utterly dreadful writing.

But the worst thing of all is what this whole Impossible Girl arc ends up doing to the Doctor. I completely resent the implication that the Doctor is utterly ineffectual without a companion to help him. What? Did you think the Doctor got out of those situations using his wits and his brains? Nope. Turns out Clara was the one responsible all along. (And as for the scene where Clara tells the First Doctor which TARDIS to steal, I would like to take this opportunity to tell Moffat to grab something long and spiky and to shove it firmly up his own rancid, self indulgent arse). 

Finally I’d like to go back to something I touched upon at the beginning of this review. It’s all about the Doctor. Remember the good old days when the Doctor was just some guy who went on adventures across time and space and helped people out? Now he’s become this ultimate puzzle piece that completes the universe. Whole star systems blink out of existence just because he dies. He’s that special and important now. There have been quite a few times during the Moffat era and indeed this very series where the action has ground to halt in order to talk about just how special the Doctor is. To a certain extent I can understand why Moffat is doing this. It’s the 50th anniversary. Things were bound to get a little nostalgic and no doubt Moffat sees this as a fitting tribute, but the problem is the show is starting to become too insular. Doctor Who was never just about the Doctor. It was about the worlds, cultures and people he met, and we learnt about his character through his interactions with them. By making the Doctor the centre of the fucking universe that everything revolves around, it actually constricts and restrains the rest of the show. That’s what Moffat really can’t seem to understand and it’s this reason, among others, why I have such a low opinion of his work on Doctor Who.

The Name Of The Doctor doesn’t make any sense on any conceivable level. A lot of it just comes across like really bad Doctor Who fanfiction. In fact the majority of Series 7 felt like that. Most of the episodes were badly written, under-developed and/or poorly thought out, and at this point Moffat had become so pretentious and so ego driven that he was actually starting to put a serious dent into the franchise. I honestly can’t think of a worse candidate to write a 50th anniversary special than him. I mean the insulting way he introduced the War Doctor alone was... No. I’ll save that for next time.

[yeonchi]

Doctor Who Series 12 Review Part 2/10: Spyfall Part Two

Air date: 5 January 2020

If the last episode didn’t raise enough questions for me already, this episode raises more questions and doesn’t bother to answer the questions I had last time. It’s like Dark Water/Death in Heaven all over again. We’re definitely going back to where Doctor Who should be.

Here’s this week’s spoiler-free thought: “Will some of them be coming back later?”

Spoilers continue after the break. Once again, please make sure you have watched both last week and this week’s episode before you proceed.

I’m putting this at the top now - I’ll be away for the next two episodes, so the reviews for them and the fifth episode will be delayed to the week of 27 January.

Oh, and just before I start - this review was sponsored by ZAIA Enterprise.

Where we last left off

A quick summary of Part One - the Doctor and her friends are enlisted by MI6 to investigate the deaths of spies across the world who had their DNA rewritten. While the Doctor and Graham meet with an old friend of the former named “O”, Ryan and Yaz were sent to investigate Daniel Barton and his company, VOR, where they learn that Barton is 93% human. They then head to a party Barton invited them to and chased him to his plane, where “O” reveals himself to be the Master just as a bomb destroys the cockpit of the plane, Barton nowhere in sight. The Doctor is seemingly sent to an unknown realm, the same one that Yaz was sent to earlier.

The villains that became overshadowed (for a while)

So in this episode, the Kasaavin are finally mentioned and revealed to be beings from another dimension spying throughout time. They apparently also had a connection with Ada Lovelace (Gordon), which is later revealed to be because of her links to the history of the computer, which the Kasaavin were studying. I can’t help but feel that the Master and Barton overshadowed them once we got to Part Two, but they do still have some relevance. The Kasaavin’s goal is to assimilate humanity and use their DNA as a storage medium. Daniel Barton allowed himself to be used as a test subject, explaining the 93% human DNA in him. The Master wanted to facilitate Barton and the Kasaavin’s plans before getting rid of them, which backfired on him and left him trapped in the Kasaavin’s realm.

Back to O, the elephant in the room

In the review for the last episode, I didn’t believe that Sacha Dhawan was the Master because of two main things; assuming that this incarnation comes after Missy, how would she have survived getting the full blast from Saxon’s laser screwdriver and even if she did, how would she have escaped the Mondasian ship without a TARDIS? Following this, the official Doctor Who Facebook and YouTube pages posted a video of Dhawan describing a brief history of the Master which seemed to cement the fact that O was in fact another incarnation of said Time Lord.

That being said, some thoughts did come to me over the past week, while looking at other people’s comments and opinions about the episode. The Master is an archnemesis of the Doctor and during their confrontations, his main goal is to gain moral and tactical dominance over the Doctor. Therefore, I don’t think the Master would have any reason to die unless it was to spite the Doctor, which he did at the end of the Series 3 finale, The Last of the Time Lords. Had it not been for Missy’s trick with her vortex manipulator, she would have died after spiting the Doctor again at the end of Death in Heaven.

Now that I’ve watched the episode, I guess I can accept that Sacha Dhawan is the Master, but the problem now remains as to which point in his timeline this incarnation is. Information from the Doctor Who Wiki presumes that he comes after Missy, but there are still people out there who are saying that he comes between Saxon and Missy. If the former is the case, then I guess my theory is that Saxon lied and didn’t actually give Missy the full blast, because again, I don’t think he would want to rob his future self of chances to spite the Doctor again. We don’t have any further information about this, so I guess we’ll just have to see... or maybe we won’t get an answer for a very long time. I still would have liked to see the Rani return, or I wish Moffat didn’t kill Missy off and rather just left her to regenerate.

Some people have said that O is a Master from another timeline or universe, but I don’t buy it; there’s barely any indication of him being as such, even after the “multiple Earths” seen in his hut (or rather, TARDIS) were revealed to represent multiple time periods, and even if it were so, how do we know the Doctor in this universe is the same as the Doctor from whatever universe he’s from?

Gallifrey, the next elephant in the room

So with the issue of the Master barely answered, we have another issue raised - what is going on with Gallifrey? When I heard the Master mention Gallifrey being destroyed “in its little bubble universe”, I thought he was talking about the Time War, but it turned out that he destroyed it because he discovered that the Time Lords’ existence was built on “the lie of the Timeless Child”, something which was brought up back in The Ghost Monument. We still don’t know when in Gallifrey’s history that was and this complicates the Master’s timeline even further, because the last time we knew the Master was on Gallifrey was Saxon in The End of Time.

If you’ve followed Doctor Who for a while, then you’ll probably know that the Doctor hasn’t always had the best working relationship with the Time Lords and nor has the Master, hence their classification as renegade Time Lords. A lot of Gallifreyans revere the Doctor for his actions during the Time War, but it seems that the Doctor doesn’t have a lot of respect for certain Time Lords, such as Rassilon.

Let’s just hope the Timeless Child mystery doesn’t end up being a rehash of the Hybrid arc with no answer.

Other general thoughts

I wasn’t able to find any tokusatsu parallels last week, but now that the second part is out (along with the 17th episode of Kamen Rider Zero-One), I managed to spot one. Daniel Barton strikes me as a hybrid between Gai Amatsu of Zero-One (ZAIA reference at the start is purely coincidental and memetic) and Adel of Ghost. Amatsu only started coming to the spotlight in the 16th episode, but I’ve got a feeling that he has more sinister plans in store. Adel killed his father, Adonis, (twice) because their views of a perfect world didn’t match.

Connecting with the comparison to Adel, Barton’s conflict with his mother seems to stem from him moving to the US and not recognising his power. If it weren’t for that fact that he was going to start unleashing the Kasaavin on everyone, then that’s a pretty shallow reason to kill his mother, specially given that we don’t hear a lot about what their conflict was.

Noor Inayat Khan was stationed in Paris in 1943. On 13 October 1943, she was arrested after being betrayed to the Germans. She attempted to escape twice, but was taken to Germany and imprisoned in solitary confinement. Ten months after, she was abruptly transferred to Dachau concentration camp and was executed at dawn on the following morning, 13 September 1944, along with three other female agents. You’re welcome.

There are a couple of throwbacks to the RTD and Moffat eras, namely the companions going on the run inspired from The Sound of Drums and the whole timey-wimey “facilitating something in the past” thing from multiple Moffat episodes.

The Master used a perception filter to blend himself in with the Nazis, but when it got jammed by the Doctor, he was left to survive the next 77 years without his TARDIS. Let that sink in.

Some people mentioned that the Doctor wiping Ada and Noor’s minds was unjustified. For Ada, I can justify it because she was optimistic about what she learned (and she had another 18 years to live), but for Noor, I wish that the Doctor left something in her mind at least, given that she won’t see her family again until she dies the year after. Also, they’re historical figures, so the Doctor is obliged not to affect their histories too much; most who have encountered the Doctor never travel in the TARDIS, so their memories aren’t erased. Vincent van Gogh comes to mind in this regard, as he travelled to the future with the Doctor and didn’t have his mind erased. The Doctor took him to 2010 as he wanted to show him how people in the future would remember him. Sadly though, his mental problems continued plaguing him and he committed suicide soon after.

Summary and verdict

This episode reminded me that Chris Chibnall continues to rip off stuff from past eras of Doctor Who. On a first watch, the episode was quite epic, but when I started putting the pieces together, I was left with more questions than answers. Chibnall’s a real Shirakura alright, with a bit of Toshiki Inoue thrown in for good measure. I usually base my final ratings on the first watch of the episode and not with afterthoughts taken into account in order to prevent bias.

We’re finally getting back into the swing of things with the reintroduction of the Timeless Child. At this point, I’m predicting that the Master (and maybe Barton) will be back by the end of this series.

“Everything you think you know is a lie.” Maybe this line from the end of the last episode could also be directed to us as well, particularly in regards to the Master’s complicated timeline caused by his return.

As I said at the start of this review, I’ll be out for two weeks starting next Monday, so the reviews for the third, fourth and fifth episodes will be delayed. I will be watching the episodes, but I won’t be able to write reviews on them until I get back. Hopefully, I’ll get them released on the week of 27 January.

Rating: 8/10

See you all at the end of the month when I attempt to write reviews for the next three episodes in a week, starting from the third episode, Orphan 55.