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yeonchi · 2 years ago

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Doctor Who 10 for 10 Part 10/10: Series 10 (900th Post Special)

2016, my final year of high school, was a wilderness year for both BBC Doctor Who and my personal project, though there were a lot of things going on behind the scenes. While Steven Moffat was working in full gear to prepare to wind down and hand things over to Chris Chibnall, I was putting my ideas together to relaunch my personal project after a two-year hiatus, adapting the three series of the Capaldi era while creating spinoffs to retell the past, connect the present and forge the future; a bit of a broad strokes reboot, if you will, considering the conflicting continuities of past writers and ideas. At the same time, Moffat created Series 10 as a bit of a reboot (at least for the first five episodes) to help bring in new fans in an attempt to end his tenure on a high note.

2017, my first year of university, was the year of peak internet drama for me, but it was also the year when my personal project reboot took off. Although my interests were beginning to shift from Doctor Who to tokusatsu and I was beginning to grow distant from the friends who I wanted to be with and the friends who were happy to be with me, my drive to tell new stories kept me slowly powering through as my personal project continued for 6 long years. It was that same drive (and other antics) that led me to win an award for “The Next Doctor Who” at my Year 12 formal (even though I was already the Doctor), an award that I look back with pride amidst the cringiness.

My era of Doctor Who was about to end, but my true era of Doctor Who was about to start. Let’s jump into the retrospective for Series 10 and send off a series that I promised for two years and finally got around to doing this year.

Also, before I go on, I'd like to point out that this is my 900th Post Special. It would have been really fitting for this post to be the 1000th Post Special, but sometimes things just line up differently. Anyway, onto the retrospective.

1. The handover

As work on Series 9 went on, Steven Moffat was prepared to finish his tenure on Doctor Who with the 2015 Christmas Special, The Husbands of River Song, which was originally planned to be his final episode. Chris Chibnall was coming out as a likely successor and there was no equivalent for Moffat in his era like in the RTD era (Moffat wrote 6 episodes in the RTD era before becoming showrunner); the non-showrunner writer who wrote the most episodes in the Moffat era was Mark Gatiss with 7 (2 more in the RTD era), but he was close with Moffat and so he would likely decline the offer to become showrunner. The next best choice, therefore, as the non-showrunner writer who wrote the second-most episodes in the series, would be Toby Whithouse with 6 (1 more in the RTD era). Chris Chibnall tied with Peter Harness and Jamie Mathieson as fourth-most with 4 each (including co-writer credits), but Chibnall wrote one more episode in the RTD era and he was the head writer for Torchwood, writing 8 of the 26 episodes in the first two series, so it’s reasonable that Chibnall would be the likely successor for Moffat.

Sometime in August 2015, Moffat met with Chibnall to formally offer him the showrunner position on Doctor Who. However, when he learnt that Chibnall was deeply immersed in developing the third series of Broadchurch, Moffat elected to stay for another series so as to give Chibnall time to work on it. As such, that meant that he would write the 2016 Christmas Special as well. The news of Moffat’s departure was announced at the start of 2016. Peter Capaldi was offered by Chibnall to stay on for Series 11, but he decided to resign with Steven Moffat as well. Production of Series 10 was delayed to the summer of 2016 for a spring 2017 broadcast, leaving fans with a full year between the 2015 and 2016 Christmas Specials, the longest on record for the revived series until the two year gap between Series 12 and 13 (Flux) in 2020-21. This gap was apparently to allow Chibnall to form his own production team, though other elements, such as Moffat’s commitments to the production of Sherlock and sporting events like the Euros or the 2016 Rio Olympics, could have been contributing factors.

Just before Capaldi’s departure was announced in January 2017, Moffat learnt that Chibnall didn’t want to start his tenure as showrunner with a Christmas Special and that he wanted to launch the Thirteenth Doctor with a full series. With no guarantee that the Thirteenth Doctor would be cast before production on Series 10 was finished and a fear of Doctor Who losing its place in the festive season schedule, Moffat and Capaldi committed to work on the 2017 Christmas Special and for better or worse, all was well until Chibnall decided to move the Christmas Specials to New Year’s Day.

2. #WhoviansAU

Back from 2005 to 2011, once you finished watching a new episode of Doctor Who in the UK on BBC One, you would turn over to BBC Three to watch Doctor Who Confidential. In Australia, we had something like that; the episode would be available on ABC iView on Sunday morning, right after it premiered in the UK, then it would be broadcast on ABC1 that night and then after that, a talk show called Whovians would be broadcast on ABC2 (later renamed ABC Comedy and now ABC TV Plus).

Whovians was a comedy talk show hosted by “Doctor Who superfan” Rove McManus along with a panel of Australian comedians. During its first season they also had interviews with some of the cast and crew from the series. They even had an interview with former Australian politician George Christensen, and regardless of what you think about his opinions on lockdowns or vaccine mandates/passports (or anything else, really), he did a pretty badass thing and that was presenting a motion in Parliament to encourage the BBC to film an episode in Australia to celebrate 50 years of Doctor Who in Australia (the first episode was broadcast on different days in each state from 12 January - 11 June 1965). There was a small scene and a brief shot of Sydney inserted into Series 10, but the scene was filmed in Cardiff with a greenscreen backdrop to give the illusion of the Sydney Opera House, which was an okay compromise, I suppose.

Before filming each episode of Whovians, the hosts and the audience would watch the original episode subject matter before they filmed the talk show episode itself. Sometimes they would even get an early copy of an episode, which is kind of baffling since if, as panellist Adam Richard claims, they filmed on a Sunday afternoon for broadcast that night (with little editing), then the episodes would have been up on iView already, though I suppose given that the next two series would have their first TV airings on Monday or Thursday nights, it’s kind of understandable.

The series continued to run alongside Series 11 and 12 (without the Festive Specials even though they did do an episode for the 2017 Christmas Special), but no series was produced for Series 13 (Flux) presumably due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, the Newcastle local division of the Doctor Who Club of Australia organised their version of Whovians on Zoom on Monday nights after each episode aired on ABC (TV Plus). Currently, the future of this series is unknown after the ABC lost the rights for future episodes to Disney+ and all the episodes are no longer available on iView, making this a lost series until someone makes it available. To me honestly, I’m not too fussed. The show was okay, but fans or not, I just wasn’t a fan of watching a bunch of nobodies giving their half-boiled opinions on a show like Doctor Who. I don’t think I continued following the series after the first one.

Feel free to check out Crispy Pro’s video on Whovians for more information on this talk show.

3. The Nardole Saga (and companion introductions)

Series 10 as a whole, along with the 2015-2017 Christmas Specials, form what I would like to collectively call “The Nardole Saga”, which is how I packaged Series 12 of Doctor Who for my personal project. This is of course, because of the involvement of Matt Lucas, who played the character of Nardole, originally working for River Song before having his head incorporated into King Hydroflax’s robotic body, then having it extracted and given a new body from spare parts, some cybernetic and some cheap, like his lungs, then becoming the Doctor’s companion, or rather, assistant, some time after.

Another notable thing to note is that Matt Lucas is a gay man, making for a more progressive TARDIS team when they were joined by Pearl Mackie as Bill Potts for Series 10; her character would be portrayed as an openly gay companion (like Jack Harkness wasn’t “openly gay” when he was introduced, oh but I guess being pansexual doesn’t count, but then again I think Moffat has some contempt for Torchwood) before Mackie came out as bisexual in 2020.

Lucas had enjoyed his time filming The Husbands of River Song and expressed an interest in returning. Since Moffat wanted a second supporting character for his reboot setting, he decided to reintroduce Nardole in a handful of cameo appearances, but when Moffat learned that Lucas was willing to commit more time to the series than he expected, he gave Nardole more appearances and even decided to reintroduce him in the 2016 Christmas Special, The Return of Doctor Mysterio.

I don’t have a lot to say about The Return of Doctor Mysterio. It’s about a boy who becomes a Superman-ripoff superhero known as The Ghost when a young Grant Gordon swallowed a gem the Doctor wanted him to hold while he tried to solve the time distortions in New York. It’s amusing to me that the characters of Lucy Fletcher and Mr Brock were played by UK actors who resembled Brittany Anne Pirtle and Najee De-Tiege, who played Emily and Kevin in Power Rangers Samurai, but I suppose it would have cost them more to cover flights and work visas. Also, Justin Chadwick and/or Brittany Anne Pirtle Charity Wakefield should have been credited in the opening credits. I swear, Peter Capaldi’s name holds for a couple of seconds, then there’s nothing else for a bit and then Matt Lucas’ name comes up after the Doctor’s face. I know the 2016 Christmas Special was produced as part of Series 10, but that’s no excuse. Then again, the production team were never consistent with their presentation of the Capaldi era title sequence anyway.

When Pearl Mackie’s casting was announced on 23 April 2016, the production team released a minisode on YouTube based on one of the audition pieces called Friend from the Future. Moffat wrote Bill’s debut episode, The Pilot, to make the minisode fit into the series, then most of the minisode’s dialogue was cut either for pacing or unimportance; he would later claim on The Fan Show that he ultimately deleted the scene because the audience was already introduced to Bill and so he didn’t need her to be introduced again in the episode itself. However, I honestly think the scene should have been included in the episode because not all new audiences will go out of their way to watch the minisode before watching The Pilot and as I’ve implied before, there’s no reason why such deleted-scene minisodes should have been deleted from their respective episodes in the first place.

4. Diversity, inclusion and whiny SJWs

OK, we need to address one of the big talking points about Series 10. Many critics of the Chibnall/Whittaker era who say that the series became woke with their era cite the roots of this to Series 10, though defenders may cite this to way back in 2005 or even 1963 as a rebuttal. In my opinion, the revived series has done politics more subtly before gradually becoming less subtle and more in-your-face over the years to the point where the Chibnall era lectures the audience about current-year politics to the point that they forgot to make the surrounding story entertaining.

When casting for the Doctor’s new companion, it was apparently agreed that only actresses of colour would be considered in an attempt to follow the BBC’s Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, which from 2016 to 2020, involved an on-screen portrayal target of 50% women, 8% disabled people, 8% LGBT and 15% ethnic minorities. Critics of such diversity quotas may argue that (white) men are becoming disenfranchised by such pandering measures, particularly when certain women and ethnic minorities push political correctness by way of accountability and compensation for past systemic injustices during a time when the world has never been more equal than ever before. Another argument used by critics is that such measures focus on identity rather than talent, apparently undermining the principles of a meritocracy, though I have to wonder how people can see talent beyond identity if they only focus on identity and not talent. It’s probably how we got such a mediocre cast in the Chibnall era and how RTD picked Ncuti Gatwa as the new Doctor when he already had someone else in mind.

It’s been said that Steven Moffat has received criticism during his time as showrunner for being sexist, racist, homophobic, everything that SJWs can think of under the sun and that he had to learn how to be woke in order to appease those critics. If you don’t believe me then I’ll leave a bunch of links below. By the way, a little disclaimer - the following links were compiled by Burrunjor, who has written super-long blog posts about the state of Doctor Who if you care to read through them. I don’t endorse his opinions nor do I agree with much of them.

Article 1: Why Third Wave Feminism and Social Justice Warriors Have Ruined Doctor Who

Article 2: What I Would Have Liked To Have Seen In The Peter Capaldi Era

I know the same can be said of the so-called NMDs in the Chibnall era (not that the above feminists and SJWs weren’t the NMDs of the Moffat era) but when I see stuff like this I just think, “God, can’t we all just enjoy something without expecting the production team to pander to whiny niche corners of the audience?” As I said in my concluding post for the Thirteenth Doctor Reviews:

RTD is someone who has been woke from the beginning, yet knows how to subtly incorporate politics in a way that still makes the episode entertaining; Steven Moffat is someone who had to learn how to be woke judging from the reception of Series 10; while Chris Chibnall is the r/FellowKids version of woke.

It might look like I’m siding with anti-SJWs with what I’ve written so far about the wokeification of Doctor Who in Series 10 (maybe also in the Thirteenth Doctor Reviews), but I’m more of a centrist who tries to get things from both sides in order to help the other side understand why they feel that way (and in some cases why they’re wrong).

Another point of contention is that Bill Potts’ homosexuality was “shoved down our throats”. Now, I didn’t really notice it or mind it while I was watching the series, but I wanted to see the extent of this for myself. Two users on Reddit’s /r/Gallifrey board have done separate studies on the sexuality of the revived series companions, but I wanted to do my own independent study because neither of them have provided detailed evidence of what was said in which episode to emphasise a companion’s sexuality. Going through the transcripts for Series 10, here are the references and inclusions of Bill Potts’ sexuality:

The Pilot: Bill is introduced from the outset to be a lesbian. At the start she talks about giving a girl extra chips because she fancied her. This scene: Moira: “You need to keep your eye on men.” Bill: “Men aren’t where I keep my eye, actually.”

Smile: N/A

Thin Ice: “So the Tardis has dresses and likes a bit of trouble? Yeah, I think I’m low-key in love with her.”

Knock Knock: This scene: Paul: “Bill, if you get scared in the night, you know where I am, yeah?” Bill: “What?” Paul: “Just if you need any er, of my help, or my whatever, you know?” Bill: “Yeah. Er, I get that you’re into me, but, um, sorry, you’re not my type. It’s just, er I tend to go for girls, usually, so…” Paul: “Oh. Oh, right! I was never in with a chance. Awesome!”

Oxygen: N/A

Extremis: In the Shadow World, Bill is shown on a date with Penny before they are interrupted by the Pope at the former’s home.

The Pyramid at the End of the World: On the Doctor’s suggestion, Bill goes on a date with Penny. They are back at Bill’s home when they are interrupted by the Secretary General of the United Nations and his soldiers.

The Lie of the Land: N/A

Empress of Mars: N/A

The Eaters of Light: This scene: Bill: “Ah. Lucius, er. Right, listen. There’s um… something I should explain.” Lucius: “What?” Bill: “This is probably just a really difficult idea. I don’t like men… that way.” Lucius: “What, not ever?” Bill: “Nah. Not ever. Only women.” Lucius: “Oh. Alright. Yeah, I got it. You’re like Vitus, then.” Bill: “What?” Lucius: “He only likes men.” Vitus: “Some men. Better looking men than you, Lucius.” Lucius: “I don’t think it’s narrow-minded. I think it’s fine. You know what you like.” Bill: “And you like both?” Lucius: “I’m just ordinary. You know, I like men and women.” Bill: “Ha! Well, isn’t this all very… modern.” Lucius: “Hey, not everyone has to be modern. I think it’s really sweet that you’re so… restricted.” Bill: “Cheers.” Lucius: “We can be friends, though. I did save your life. That means we’re friends forever.” Bill: (laughs) “Yeah. I can deal with that.”

World Enough and Time: N/A

The Doctor Falls: This scene, just before the final battle: Doctor: “So, if there’s anything we ought to be saying?” Bill: “I can’t think of anything. Can you?” Doctor: (thinks) “No.” Bill: “But, hey, um… you know how I’m usually all about women and… and… kind of people my own age?” Doctor: “Yeah?” Bill: “Glad you knew that.” Later, at the end of the battle, Heather returns to turn Bill into a sentient oil creature like herself before they bring the Doctor to the TARDIS and leave.

Twice Upon a Time: The following exchange between the Captain, Bill and the First Doctor: Captain: “So basically, we’re trying to track the Glass Lady, yes?” Bill: “Basically.” Captain: “A striking looking creature. Quite beautiful, really, isn’t she?” Bill: “Yeah, if you like ladies made of glass.” First Doctor: “Well, aren’t all ladies made of glass, in a way?” (laughs) Captain: (laughs) “Very good, sir, very good.” Bill: “Are we now?” First Doctor: “Oh, my dear. I hope it doesn’t offend you to know that I have some experience of the er, fairer sex.” Bill: “Me too.” Captain: “Good Lord.”

Now, from the above list, we can see that Bill being lesbian is only mentioned once or twice in some and depictions in a couple others doesn’t take up a good chunk of the episode, except maybe for The Pilot but that’s because the plot called for it. Not all episodes in the series have such depictions or references to Bill’s sexuality, though I might have missed some while writing this. As such, having references to Bill’s sexuality in almost every episode might be on-the-nose, but I don’t think it counts as being “shoved down our throats”.

However, Bill being a bit of a woke progressive and possibly an SJW, however, I can sort of get behind because she’s young, black, lesbian and she works at a university; my position would be strengthened if she were actually a student there. Again, I’m going to list some references from each episode of Bill being progressive, though keep in mind that some of them are more general:

The Pilot: I’m a bit meh on this, but… Heather: “There’s a puddle over there, but it hasn’t rained for a week.” Bill: “Yeah, but, well, you know, half the students here are blokes.”

Smile: “Is there going to be food sexism even in the future? Is this bloke utopia?”

Thin Ice: From the start of the episode: Bill: “Wait, you want to go out there?” Doctor: “You don’t?” Bill: “It’s 1814.” (points to her face) “Melanin?” Doctor: “Yes?” Bill: “Slavery is still totally a thing.” Doctor: “Yes, so it is.” This one’s more general and sign-of-the-times, but… Sutcliffe: “Who, who let this creature in here? On your feet, girl, in the presence of your betters!” Doctor: (punches Sutcliffe) “He’s human. Thirty one years of age. Low on iron.” Bill: “Yeah, that was pretty convincing racism for an extraterrestrial.” Doctor: “My thoughts exactly.” Same with this one: Doctor: “Er, you, boy! Remind me, what’s your name?” Perry: (mouth full) “Perry.” Kittie: “Perry. His name’s Perry. Why?” Bill: “Apparently, Lord Sutcliffe’s long-lost heir can’t be a girl.”

Knock Knock: N/A

Oxygen: Bill gets called a racist when she is startled by Dahh-Ren’s appearance. “Look, for the record, I’m not prejudiced. I’m usually on the receiving end.”

Extremis: Bill tries to walk in front of Nardole. Nardole stops Bill from doing so, but she says, “Yeah, totally not happening” before Nardole tells her that just as he is officially authorised to “kick the Doctor’s arse,” he will happily do the same to her if she doesn’t follow his instructions. Bill doesn’t react negatively to Nardole’s comment, but she asks him if he is “secretly a badass”.

The Pyramid at the End of the World: The Secretary General tells Bill that he wants to speak to the President, referring to the Doctor as the appointed President of Earth. Bill does not know this and thinks that he is talking about Donald Trump, to which she says, “I don’t know the President. How would I know the President? I mean, I wouldn’t even have voted for him. He’s… orange.”

The Lie of the Land: N/A

Empress of Mars: Colonel Godsacre laughs at Bill when she tells him that she and the Doctor are “sort of police”. Bill says, “Listen, yeah? I’m going to make allowances for your Victorian attitudes because, well, you actually are Victorian.”

The Eaters of Light: N/A

World Enough and Time: N/A

The Doctor Falls: N/A

Twice Upon a Time: Upon meeting Bill, the Captain initially believed that her life was being offered in exchange for his own and offered it to the glass woman, but Bill said that it was “totally not happening”. The aforementioned exchange between the Captain, Bill and the First Doctor. This: Bill: “You’re an arse. Do you know that? You- you- you- you’re a stupid bloody arse.” Doctor: “As I have always respected you.” First Doctor: (opens TARDIS door) “If I hear any more language like that from you, young lady, you’re in for a jolly good smacked bottom.” (goes back inside) Doctor: (shocked) “Can we just pretend that that never happened?” Bill: “I’m a broad-minded girl. I mean, I know we have this whole professor-student thing going on…” Doctor: “Can we just never, ever talk about this again?” Bill: “Yeah, I hope we talk about it loads. (chuckle) I hope we spend years laughing about it.” Bill offers to look after the Captain in the First Doctor’s TARDIS: Bill: “I’ll look after him.” First Doctor: “Good girl, quite right. Now, young lady, I don’t want to have to repeat myself.” Bill: “I don’t think any of us want that.” First Doctor: “I’ll see you both presently.”

Once again, I might have missed some references there, but an important thing to note is that Bill wasn’t the only character saying progressive things in Series 10; the Doctor had his fair share as well and there might have been other characters doing the same.

If we combine the references and depictions of Bill’s sexuality with the references of Bill being progressive, a few gaps are covered but there are still episodes where neither Bill’s sexuality or progressiveness were referenced. As such, the claim that Bill’s sexuality alone was shoved down our throats is a bit exaggerated, but if you want to combine that with her progressiveness and say that Bill’s progressiveness was shoved down our throats, by all means go for it. Some might see it as a negative thing, but that wasn’t really my line of thinking when I was watching the series as it aired. It might feel like Moffat wrote Bill the way he did because of the criticism he received about his era and it’s quite understandable, but I can’t help but think that it contributed to the declining quality of the series in the Chibnall era. Also, holy shit, this one point is 5 pages long when I drafted it in Google Docs. My rant about Hong Kong in the last instalment only took up 3.

5. The Vault

The main mystery for the first half of the series revolved around the Vault and the mysterious inhabitant within. Speculation was rife as to who was actually in the Vault; I remember someone on Whovians speculating that it might have been a past or future incarnation of the Doctor, unknown or otherwise, and Moffat had considered Davros being in it, however he ultimately decided to use Missy, and her character development would be the focus of the second half of the series. Series 10 gave quite a bit of focus on Missy which made up for her lack of appearances after the Series 9 opener.

Following his date with River Song on Darillium, the Doctor was called to a planet where Missy had been tried and sentenced to death, and the Doctor was to act as her executioner, after which Missy’s body would be placed into a Quantum Fold Chamber for a thousand years under constant guard. A priest interrupts the execution and a brief pause for divine intervention is approved, during which the Doctor learns that Nardole had followed him from Darillium to deliver a message of disapproval from River. As such, the Doctor swears to look after Missy’s body for a thousand years before proceeding to execute her anyway, but when the other executioners find that she is still alive, the Doctor reveals that he fiddled with the machine because Missy was his friend. When the chief executioner voices his outrage, the Doctor has him look up himself in the Fatality Index under “cause of death”; the ensuing results scare the executioners away and the Doctor and Nardole place Missy into the Quantum Fold Chamber, eventually going on to settle at St Luke’s University in Bristol, guarding what would now be known as the Vault for at least 70 years.

Nardole took up the responsibility of holding the Doctor accountable to his oath and would be dismayed, even outraged, when the Doctor went off-world with Bill, even to another time. The Doctor even gave Missy things like a piano, much to Nardole’s dismay. Eventually, the Doctor had no other choice but to enter the vault and consult Missy about the Monks. Following this, Nardole had to seek Missy’s help at one point when the TARDIS went back to Earth and he couldn’t get it back to the Doctor. Later, the Doctor would let Missy in the TARDIS but would essentially trap her in it while preventing her from operating it as well. I know Nardole may have had good intentions but the whole thing just made him a bit annoying in my eyes.

6. Truth

The highlight of Series 10 for me was the Monks three-parter, jointly written by Steven Moffat, Peter Harness and Toby Whithouse. It was highly inspired by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 and his conquests against “fake news”, something that ironically rang true when he was elected late that year. However, given the state of current affairs in the years after Series 10 aired, this could ironically apply to Joe Biden and the left as well. This is what I feel is the problem with implementing current year politics in media; even if there are people who might like or not like the politics being shown, those politics might not age well in the years to come. Refer to my rant from the last instalment about the Zygon two-parter.

The background of this arc begins in Oxygen when the Doctor is rendered blind after he exposed himself to the vacuum of space to save Bill and get her to safety. Nardole is apparently able to restore the Doctor’s eyes at the end, but as he berates him, the Doctor reveals that he is still blind.

In Extremis, a shadow version of the Doctor gives the Doctor a message through his sonic sunglasses. In that world, there is a book known as Veritas that contains a truth so true that anyone who ever read or translated it committed suicide. The Pope brings the Doctor to the Vatican so he can read it for himself. Bill and Nardole discover a room with doors of light leading to locations of international importance, such as the Pentagon, the Vatican, CERN and the White House. Bill and Nardole learn about the shadow test from the people at CERN while the Doctor manages to listen to the Veritas despite being pursued by the Monks.

The Veritas is a story of a demon who wants to conquer the world, but because he needs to learn about it first, he creates a shadow world with people who think they are real. The shadow test involves people bringing up any number in any particular order and the results will always be the same because they are all in the same simulation. It works kind of like a predetermined algorithm in programming as in coding, there is really no such thing as a “random number”. The people committing suicide as a result of learning this is like people trying to break the cycle and rebelling against the programming.

Moving onto The Pyramid at the End of the World, the Doctor is summoned to Turmezistan (from Series 9) to investigate a pyramid that has appeared in the middle of a war zone between the Americans, Russians and the Chinese. They try to attack it from the air and from the water, but they prevent the attacks and rescue the soldiers. The Doctor learns that the Monks have simulated various scenarios of Earth’s future, detected a catastrophe in one and offered to stop it from happening, but the Monks must have pure consent out of love without fear, strategy or agenda; as such, the UN Secretary General and the American, Russian and Chinese soldiers fail to provide the right consent and are disintegrated.

Somehow, the Doctor manages to find a lab which is the accident the Monks have been waiting to happen; a misplaced decimal point created a bacteria that turns any living thing it touches into gunk. He sends Nardole back to the TARDIS while he creates a bomb to blow up the lab before it vents the bacteria out into the air. However, once he sets the timer on the bomb, the Doctor is unable to get out because the door uses a combination lock with no raised numbers or braille, the sonic screwdriver can’t manipulate the lock, it can only be opened from the inside due to the emergency protocol (because the lab person clearly messed up the numbers after she went through, the fucking dick) and Nardole is incapacitated due to the effect of the bacteria on his cheap lungs. The Doctor finally reveals to Bill that he has been blind all along and despite his protests, Bill gives her consent to the Monks in exchange for the Doctor’s sight, allowing him to escape.

Six months later in The Lie of the Land, Earth is under full control of the Monks, with transmissions and broadcasts being used to maintain their retconning of history to the population. As Bill talks to an imaginary fabrication of her mum as a coping mechanism, there is something I should point out. Bill’s mum died when she was just a baby and there is no mention of her dad (starting the hate on single fathers early, eh, Moffat?); Moira brought her up for presumably as long as she could remember. Bill’s mum apparently hated having her picture taken (how would she know this if she died when she was a baby, keep in mind that no other family members are mentioned) and when she brought this up to the Doctor after he failed to give her something for Christmas, the Doctor went back in time, took some pictures of Bill’s mum and left them as a present for Bill, which led her to form the imaginary fabrication of her mum. This plays a role for Bill in the finale and looking back, I think it might seem a bit less contrived if Bill had photos of her mum since she was a baby and what the Doctor actually took was videos of her to give Bill some voice samples. But then again, given my parents, you know what they say about meeting your heroes.

Nardole, having been incapacitated for six weeks, manages to find Bill and they set out to find the Doctor together, having spent the rest of the time “finding” him. They find the Doctor on a prison ship, but he has apparently joined the Monks. During the ensuing confrontation, Bill takes a gun and shoots the Doctor. The Doctor proceeds to regenerate, but he was actually faking it as he reveals that the bullets were blanks; the Doctor spent six months deprogramming people and exchanging their ammo, that is, with the exception of Dave.

Anyway, the Doctor and Bill briefly go back to the university and visit Missy in the Vault to discuss the Monks. The Monks take on the forms of a populace to get someone to consent to their help, then they create a psychic link with the person that makes them the anchor to keep them in power, making them the lynchpin. But since the brainwaves of that person wouldn’t be enough to cover the entire planet, they put up statues of themselves as transmitters to boost the signal. The lynchpin goes on through the person’s bloodline for generations until it stops somehow. Missy’s solution is to kill the lynchpin, which she learns is Bill, but since it would take ages, her other solution is to make Bill into a braindead vegetable so that her residual brainwaves blot out the false memories.

Opting for another solution, the Doctor and his group head for the pyramid which had been moved to London. They make it to the broadcast chamber, with the exception of Alan whose deprogramming failed due to an accident caused in a skirmish with the Monks and had to be knocked out with a Tarovian neck pinch from Nardole. Confronting the Giant Monk at the centre of the fake news, the Doctor tries linking into its mind to override the transmission, but he is unsuccessful. Bill decides to link into the Giant Monk’s mind herself, despite the Doctor’s protests, and she uses the image of her mum to open the minds of everyone in the world, causing them to rebel and the Monks to flee. So that’s how we defeat the Monks then, transmit the image of an imaginary friend (who happens to be a beautiful woman) across the world. Wouldn’t it have been creepy if that image was of someone’s crush and it got transmitted across the world? Ahahaha I’m fucking brain damaged lmao.

All in all, the Monk trilogy was pretty good, despite criticism that the third part fell off. It might have been better had Moffat actually co-written the third part like he did the second, or better yet, if all three episodes were an actual joint collaborative effort, but Steven Moffat’s mother was in hospital while he was writing his parts of the trilogy; he ended up having to type up the final draft of the second part at his mother’s bedside because there were only days left before the two episodes were to begin filming and production couldn’t be pushed back to later.

To highlight the parallels to Donald Trump, the Monks were villains who had good intentions, but they used underhanded techniques to maintain power over the populace such as using memory police to arrest people if they began to realise that they had only come to power recently instead of being there since the beginning of Earth. What other powers the Monks had is unknown since we never really see them in use. Speaking of which, how different would the world have been if the Monks had stayed in power, other than a retconned history and memory police?

In spite of this, Australia was largely protected from the Monks’ fake news thanks to the efforts of UNIT, the Power Rangers, the Kamen Riders, the Ultramen and the Space Sheriffs, but that’s more of a personal project thing.

7. Doctor Gatekeeper

Before I go on to talk about the finale, I want to talk a little bit about the state of the fandom since the airing of Series 10.

There’s been quite a bit of gatekeeping happening in various fandoms over the years, with people being told they’re not a (true) fan of something of they like or don’t like a certain thing, or if they express opinions about something which are apparently bigoted, then they’re not a (true) fan as it were. Let’s face it, I hate people who do this because they don’t know to what extent the other person is a fan of the thing. My bottom line is that a fan is a fan if they say, claim or believe themselves to be one. Though I believe there should be a certain expectation of knowledge as to what the source material is, the kind of fans it attracts and the culture that they thrive in, gatekeeping people from a fandom is detrimental to the tenets of fandom, which is people sharing their interests and passions with other people who have similar interests and passions.

At the 2017 BFI & Radio Times Television Festival, there was a Doctor Who panel with Steven Moffat, Brian Minchin, Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie. A fan revealed that they had been the victim of cyberbullying after being on set with Capaldi in the TARDIS some weeks prior and asked “the Doctor” what he felt about bullying and how he would fight it. After a kind comment from Moffat, Capaldi had this to say:

The essence of Doctor Who is kindness, you know, that is what really is underneath all of this; it’s that this is a person who moves through time and space and history, and all kinds of situations, and reacts to them, ultimately - despite the different way, the different versions of him may appear - he reacts with kindness. And that is how everyone who is involved with Doctor Who should be and how everyone who is a fan of it should be. If they’re not kind, they’re not receiving the show in the proper way and they’re not really a fan of it.

You can watch the panel, timestamped to the question being asked here.

In the Doctor Who fandom, people tend to point to comments like this as a justification for gatekeeping “bullies”, but in the end, this is just Capaldi’s own opinion. Maybe we can agree that the bullies are missing the point of the morals the show teaches the audience about, but we live in an age where it’s difficult to distinguish well-intentioned people from bullies, particularly with politics as polarised as it is to the point where both sides may not be right about some things, but they might not be wrong about other things either, hence my opinion on why gatekeeping is bad.

8. A perfunctory Time Team

This is more of a Chibnall era thing, but I just wanted to touch on how attempts from the production companies or their affiliates to participate in a show’s fandom can sometimes come off as out of touch.

In Doctor Who Magazine, there is a feature known as The Time Team. Three iterations of this team were featured over the years; the first team reviewed the classic series and TV movie from 1999 to 2009, then a second team reviewed the revived series up to The Almost People from 2011 to 2017. Following this, a third team, with more members than the last two teams, would make their debut in 2018, but instead of continuing to review the revived series episodes in order, they would review episodes based on a particular theme. Their run ended in 2019 and with it, the Time Team segment as a whole.

When they were announced, the Time Team were criticised for being diverse in everything but age, with the average age of the whole group being 22. They were also criticised for being biased as one of their members, Claudia Boleyn, was an outspoken feminist (she would leave after six issues due to “differences” with editor Benjamin Cook, though some speculate that it might be because Cook didn’t like her criticisms of Moffat’s writing), while another member, Christel Dee, was previously the host of The Fan Show and at the time, the digital marketing manager for BBC Studios, focusing on the marketing for Doctor Who Series 11, putting a bit of nepotism into the mix.

Finally, and this may be a bit subjective, but some members of the Time Team were also criticised for not respecting the classic series, with Miles and Luke saying that it relied heavily on cliffhangers and they were “cheap tricks” as a result, while Christel stated that she watches the classic series at 1.5 speed. Honestly, I don’t find the classic series interesting to watch because the presentation of the episodes wasn’t as vibrant and/or coherent than the revived series episodes (due to the production standards and broadcasting systems of the time), but I’m not going to slag it off because of that and if I really had to watch the episodes, I’d put some subtitles on because maybe then I’d find the stories easier to follow, not watch it at 1.5 speed.

Did you follow the Time Team and their commentary and if so, what did you think of it? Feel free to let me know.

9. The Fall of the Doctor

A couple of weeks before the series started, John Simm was announced to be returning as the Master. Some people say that the announcement spoiled his return when he was revealed in the series finale, but who cares, the Master was back and we would finally get an explanation for the Harold Saxon Master’s regeneration into Missy.

Following a teaser of the Doctor’s regeneration, World Enough and Time (a strange title for an episode) begins with the TARDIS on a colony ship reversing from a black hole. The Doctor sends Missy with Bill and Nardole in an effort to test her rehabilitation to the good side. An alien named Jorj comes out with a gun, saying that “they” are coming up because of Bill’s presence as a human. The Doctor comes out as well and during the ensuing confrontation, Bill is shot through the abdomen. As a group of Patients take Bill’s body away into the lower levels of the ship, the Doctor, Missy and Nardole try to get a hold of the situation with Jorj; originally, there was a skeleton crew of 50 people alongside Jorj, but when it was being drawn into a black hole, 20 engineers were sent to reverse the rear thrusters. Soon after, the Patients arrived and took the rest of the humans away, leaving Jorj behind as he broadcast a distress signal. It became evident that in the space of two days on Floor 0000, centuries had passed on Floor 1056. By the time the Doctor and Nardole got to Bill over two hours after their arrival, ten years had passed for Bill and she had been converted into a Mondasian Cyberman as the first subject of Operation Exodus thanks to the machinations of a man called Razor, who was actually a disguise for the Master, who had encountered his future self as well.

The story continues in The Doctor Falls and I can’t believe they missed the chance to call it The Fall of the Doctor. Whatever, I’ve corrected that for my personal project.

The Doctor is tied up while the Master and Missy taunt him, but unbeknownst to them, the Doctor reconfigured the Cybermen programming to target Time Lords as well. As Nardole finds an escape ship, Missy knocks her past self out and the Doctor is electrocuted by a Cyberman, though they eventually manage to escape to Floor 507 with Bill.

On Floor 507, the humans have been defending themselves from the Patients, or prototype Cybermen, even putting some of them up as scarecrows. Although Bill has been converted into a Cyberman, she has been able to retain her sense of humanity following the six months living under the Monks. Nardole helps the humans fortify their defences while the Doctor, the Master, Missy and Bill find some lifts so they can evacuate the humans. Missy summons the lift and a weapons-grade Cyberman comes out, which they quickly kill. Since Floor 1056 has had many years to build up an army of Cybermen, they can only go up a few floors as the attack phase of Operation Exodus begins.

Missy learns from her past self that after the Time Lords cured the drumming in his head and mutually kicked him out of Gallifrey, he landed his TARDIS on Level 1056, too close to the black home, and blew out his dematerialisation circuit going too fast before a scary lady made him promise to always carry a spare dematerialisation circuit, which turns out to happen as Missy gives the spare circuit to his past self. The Master and Missy decide to leave, but as Missy brings her past self to the lift, she gives him a hug and fatally wounds him, giving him enough time to get back to his TARDIS before regenerating. As Missy says that it’s time to stand with the Doctor, the Master denies this and gives her the full blast of his laser screwdriver, rendering her unable to regenerate before the Master descends back to Floor 1056. At the time I was okay with seeing the Master dead for good, which led me to be bewildered when Sacha Dhawan became the Master in Series 12. After thinking it over, I realised that the Master would never rob himself of chances to spite the Doctor, plus, now that he knew that he and his future self would end up killing each other, he would somehow be able to put a contingency plan in place that would allow him to survive past his Missy incarnation. Also, I think it’s good that we never actually see the Saxon Master regenerate because in my personal project, I have two other incarnations of the Master that came between him and Missy and actually seeing him regenerate would have really screwed things up.

With the Doctor now determining that the Cybermen will plan a bigger assault now that they know that they are a military target, he sends Nardole away with the other humans to Floor 502 while he and Bill make their last stand against the Cybermen. As the Doctor is continually blasted by a Mondasian Cyberman, he detonates the whole Floor 507, destroying most of the Cybermen for the time being. When Bill finds the unconscious Doctor and weeps over him, Heather arrives and turns Bill into a sentient oil creature like her. As they take the Doctor into the TARDIS and set it in flight, Heather reveals to Bill that she could make her human again, or they could travel the universe together. So once again, another companion’s death is undone like Clara’s was in Series 9. Bill and Nardole would make an appearance in a Doctor Who: Lockdown! short in 2020 for the tweetalong of the two-parter (set during the pandemic with a reference to Black Lives Matter, no doubt), plus the novelisation of the 2017 Christmas Special reveals that Bill decided to become human again, living with Heather before dying of old age, essentially rendering her previous death redundant.

The Series 10 finale was the start of a great send-off to the Moffat era and the revived series so far following all the returning characters and references in Series 9. It featured the return of the original Cyberman design alongside the Cybusmen after having very few returning elements from the classic series, though other Cybermen designs from the classic series did not make an appearance, making it less of a tribute to the Cybermen than Asylum of the Daleks and The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar was to the Daleks. However, it did acknowledge the differing origins of the Cybermen and explain it off as parallel evolution. We also get some archival shots of the revived series companions as well.

The TARDIS landed on the South Pole and the Doctor began to regenerate but he stopped himself from doing so, saying that he doesn’t want to change because he can’t keep on being somebody else. It is then that the Doctor encounters a distant yet familiar figure, namely his original incarnation, the First Doctor…

10. An extra epilogue

The 2017 Christmas Special, Twice Upon a Time, is a crossover with the First Doctor’s era, featuring David Bradley as he actually played the First Doctor instead of the actor who played him, William Hartnell, as shown in An Adventure in Space and Time. The story takes place towards the end of the First Doctor’s final story, The Tenth Planet, with about a minute’s worth of reconstructed scenes filmed as much of the story’s fourth episode remains missing, though much of it did not end up being used in the end.

As the Twelfth Doctor converses with the First Doctor, time suddenly stops as the two of them are met by an army captain (played by Mark Gatiss no less), who was about to die in Ypres 1914 when time stopped for him and he was transported to an unknown ship, only to end up on the South Pole as well when a timeline error occurred. The three of them enter the Twelfth Doctor’s TARDIS and it gets transported into the spaceship, where the First Doctor tries to speak to whoever took the Captain before the Twelfth Doctor reunites with Bill, who he suspects to be a duplicate. Upon learning that a glass woman is the one behind the recent happenings, the Doctors escape the ship with Bill and the Captain and they head to the First Doctor’s TARDIS.

The Twelfth Doctor begins to track the identity behind the glass woman and heads to the weapon forges of Villengard at the centre of the universe, where he meets with Rusty the Dalek (from Into the Dalek) and learns from the Dalek Pathweb that the glass woman is modelled on Professor Helen Clay of New Earth University, founder of the Testimony Foundation that travels through time and extracts people who are near the point of their deaths to extract their memories before putting them back without any memory of the process. Those memories would then be used in glass avatars so other people can interact with them. As such, the glass woman is actually a misunderstood villain because the intentions of her and her foundation were not malicious. Bill is also revealed to be one of those glass avatars as time stops again and the Doctors are told that the Captain needs to go back to his place in time to die.

The Twelfth Doctor requests that he and the First Doctor take the Captain back because it was their fault that he ended up at the South Pole due to them trying to die twice. The Captain is taken back to Ypres 1914 and he requests to the Doctor that he look in on his family, at which point they learn that he is Captain Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart. As the Captain’s memories of his encounter with the Doctors are erased and time restarts, there is singing from both the British and German sides; it turns out that the Doctor made a slight adjustment by a couple of hours because it was Christmas and both the British and German soldiers decided to stop fighting and celebrate.

As the armistice ends, the First Doctor leaves as he prepares to regenerate while the Twelfth Doctor takes a walk with Bill. The Doctor continues to doubt that Bill is real, which leads her to kiss him as she returns his memories of Clara, who also briefly returns to greet him. Nardole also appears as well and the Doctor gives the glass avatars of his companions the proper goodbye he never got to give. He heads back to the TARDIS and accepts that regenerating again wouldn’t hurt the universe before he regenerates (with a different effect to the one used previously). The Thirteenth Doctor emerges and the TARDIS begins malfunctioning, disappearing in an explosion as she falls over Yorkshire.

Twice Upon a Time was a pretty heartfelt episode and some decent filler, but amidst all the progressive references being carried over from the rest of Series 10, there was one thing that didn’t sit right with fans and that was the characterisation of the First Doctor, as he seemingly acted somewhat misogynistic and more in line with men from the 60’s. Even the version of the First Doctor in The Five Doctors, played by Richard Hurndall, wasn’t that obnoxiously repetitive in his misogyny to the point that he can be written off as just acting like a demanding old man. It’s like Moffat deliberately wrote him that way to show everyone how progressive he and Bill are. In the novelisation, which was written by Paul Cornell instead of Moffat, the First Doctor’s misogyny was played off as him purposefully pissing off the Twelfth Doctor (like what happens in other multi-Doctor stories), which frankly, is an absolute cope given how Cornell’s in the same ilk as Moffat and RTD.

Despite the clear shift in current year progressiveness compared to previous series, Series 10 was a rather decent series for something that essentially had to be thrown together. It also served as a great farewell to the Moffat and Capaldi eras and also, ironically, the quality of the revived series as a whole.

With Moffat’s departure, the nepotism of the Fitzroy crowd, represented by many writers of the Doctor Who fan club who met at the Fitzroy pub like Moffat, RTD, Gatiss and Cornell et al, had ended. However, the series would continue to be headed by another one of their ilk, Chibnall, alongside an actress hired out of diversity and nepotism, Jodie Whittaker (who worked alongside Chibnall on Broadchurch) and a new team of amateurish writers that would see the series falling to mediocrity and later, utter disrespect. Though the series would see another peak due to the prospect of a female Doctor, audiences gradually became disinterested as shown by the ratings. Eventually, RTD decided to make his return and possibly Moffat as well, showing how much the Fitzroy crowd nepotism was better to the fanbase given what we had seen in the Chibnall era.

If I had to compare the showrunners of the revived era to main writers and producers in tokusatsu, RTD would be like Naruhisa Arakawa and Yasuko Kobayashi with Naomi Takebe, Moffat would be like Gen Urobuchi (the Japanese Moffat) and Yūya Takahashi with Takahito Ōmori, while Chibnall would be like Toshiki Inoue and Shōji Yonemura with Shinichirō Shirakura. Neither era is perfect (some more than others), but in the end, the fandom’s collective appreciation of the series is what continues to bring us together (or rather should).

Doctor Who 10 for 10 has reached its end. I would like to thank everyone who liked the posts and read through this series that clearly got longer and longer with each instalment. For a couple of years, I wasn’t sure when I’d finally be able to get around to starting this series, but now I’m glad to have finally finished it, even if it took longer to write than I originally thought. If you want to read about my thoughts on the Chibnall era as it progressed, check out my Thirteenth Doctor Reviews. I also cover the details of my personal project in the Kisekae Insights series, so please feel free to check that out along with the other content I have to offer. Otherwise, I’ll be back to review Doctor Who with the 60th Anniversary Specials and Series 14, so I’ll see you all then.

#doctor who #doctor who 10 for 10 #doctor who series 10 #twelfth doctor #peter capaldi

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