This post is approximately two months late for approximately two reasons. The first reason is that The Doctor Falls, the final episode of Season 10 of Doctor Who aired the very night I began my month-long tour around China and things got away from me. The second reason is that The Doctor Falls, the finale of Season 10 is not the most interesting episode of Doctor Who.
This is the tenth season finale since the show's return in 2005 and the last before the much-publicised Chibnall/Whitaker takeover* and the show is showing its exhaustion after its twelve-year run. Moffat is clearly going through the motions, having planned to leave the show, first after the three seasons and 50th anniversary special of Matt Smith (he chose to remain with the show having found that year to be so joyless.) Next he assumed he would leave following the Season 9 finale Hell Bent which saw the return of Gallifrey and the conclusion to Clara's tenure on the TARDIS. His next final episode was The Husbands of River Song, a farcical runabout with a heartfelt final ten minutes which payed homage to a running plot line which had lasted seven years. Chibnall, the BBC's first choice for showrunner was unavailable to begin work on the show until 2017 due to his commitments to Broadchurch and so it fell to Moffat to create one more season. And one more season finale.
The Doctor Falls picks up directly after the horrific events of World Enough and Time. The Master has turned Bill into a cyberman, Missy has been tempted back to the Dark Side, The Doctor is tied to a wheeled device again (apparently the Simm Master's only evil plan see The Last of the Time Lords and The End of Time for full details) and Nardole quips are not required in this scene. It's a dark scene. The Doctor sets the cybermen on his enemies and the Timelords, cyberBill and English Comedian flee their enemies rising up through the decks of the spaceship. The meat of the episode takes place on a "solar farm" - a deck of the ship which looks like a field and is the home to a group of human settlers mainly consisting of cute children. Not much happens for 40 minutes. Eventually the Doctor sacrifices himself.
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| Master pushes Doctor in wheelchair (2007) |
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| Master ties Doctor to Hand-Truck (2010) no doubt, makes plans to push |
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| Master ties Doctor to Wheelchair (2017) No doubt pushed him onto roof |
The story here is familiar. The Doctor, in his final adventure before regeneration (yes, final adventure. I sense that Christmas' Twice Upon A Time will be an epilogue to this Doctor's tenure) must sacrifice himself to save a small group of people. Not the entire universe, just a noble sacrifice because he believes everyone - no matter how small - to be important. This sacrifice is reminiscent of the Matt Smith finale The Time of the Doctor in which the good Doc retires in a small village to guard it from an warring band of his enemies, eventually giving his life. The story is essentially a retread, in broad strokes but The Doctor Falls has something over its 2013 counterpart which is its simplicity. Whilst The Time of the Doctor seemed to cram about a season's worth of potential into one hour, not to mention jumbled explanations for all of the plot threads left hanging throughout Matt Smith's tenure. The Doctor Falls is much like a play in that it focuses on the interior lives of its characters, it sets them all up in the playpen and through dialogue reveals - what's up, how it's hanging and just how sad they are about being chopped up and turned into cybermen.
The problem with this approach is that it's too simple. We have, for the first time ever, two Masters on screen together but besides some silly jokes about self-cest (fun for all the family, keeping it classy with Ste-Mo) they mostly just sit around, say they want to run away and then run away. The Doctor and Bill have a lot of screen time together (and Pearl Mackie is incredible) but the sum total of all of those minutes on screen is to establish that Bill is not very happy about being a cyberman. This Doctor, Capaldi's Doctor, who tried to travel to the afterlife to resurrect Danny Pink and broke all of the laws of time in order to resurrect Clara is completely inactive in the face of Bill's sticky situation. He is the reckless Doctor - the one who would go to any lengths to save the one's he loves, he gave up his memories, his eye-sights and his place amongst his people for his friends in this and previous seasons and so it feels a little bit odd that he has so little drive to right wrongs here. Nardole - weirdly - is the best served of the main characters in this story. He has gone from a bumbling sidekick to River Song to the scientific mind that solves every problem possible in this episode in the space of just under two years. Yes, the romance between him and Samantha Spiro's character is a little odd and it's a bit unconvincing for Moffat to write him lines calling back to his days as a hustler on the black market (really? When was that ever referenced before) but the scene where The Doctor convinces him to save himself by convincing him that it is the more difficult path - appealing to Nardole's well established cockiness - is a neat peice of writing which satisfyingly concludes Matt Lucas' time on the show but leaves his spot on the TARDIS wide open for a potential return. I'd have him back.
Joining Nardole's payoff in the "Good things" bucket is the double suicide/homocide by The Master and Missy. This conclusion to the two Master's time together is great, if only it had been set up by some character development or plot. Moffat has always had a pitch-black sense of irony and this ending played out like the sick inverse of a multi-doctor story. The Doctors will traditionally meet up and bicker for 90 per cent of the run time before coming together, the best of friends by the episode's conclusion. For The Master, his time together with herself could only ever end in the most destructive way possible, this following on from their quasi-romantic appreciation for each other throughout the run time. The Master is above all else a narcissist. It figures that he would love himself but that the differences between his registrations would be perceived as impurity. It's fucked up. I liked it.
Other strong points in the episode include the aesthetic. A field of "patients" tied to posts like scarecrows offers a disturbing hook for the episode introducing the notion of a farm which is not a farm, establishing the queer setting for the episode. The use of multiple generations of cybermen is better justified and therefore more satisfying than the episodes which feature multiple generations of Daleks for little reason (Asylum of the, The Magician's Apprentice and The Witch's Familiar) and then there's Capaldi's Doctor doing what he does best - making a big, heartfelt speech. The scene which features The Doctor confronting The Masters and stating the reasoning for his life's work is powerful. Whilst it's hardly possible to distil 54 years worth of contradictory and eclectic behaviour on the Doctor's part down to a few lines of dialogue this is a fair attempt and it's a good message - why not just be "kind"?
And then - The Doctor kills himself and all the cybermen in a giant explosion except Bill was the only cyberman not killed in the explosion and so she cries a tear which means the puddle girl can arrive and heal Bill entirely and teleport her and The Doctor to safety. It's a lot to swallow. It's ridiculous but it's better in my view that a beloved companion not end her time on the show a mutilated husk of a person trapped in an agonising shell for all eternity. Bill had been so thoroughly written into a horrific corner that I'm just glad Steven thought to seed her resurrection in before the episode that he needed it in this time. Bill had a lot of potential, Pearl Mackie fulfilled it but I'm not sure the character did.
And so Season 10 winds down to a close with our wild-haired hero putting off his new body as his original persona toddling towards him through a snowstorm. It's been a strange ride. The season started off feeling incredibly fresh, despite new ideas occurring in every episode they were remixed, combined in interesting new ways by writers with fresh takes. The idea of The Doctor taking up a position as a lecturer in a University felt like a natural way to find a new angle to inspect this tried and tested hero but despite some brilliant expository lectures this promised reimagining of the show never quite came to pass. Around the middle of the series the well structured and tightly paced single-part episodes gave way to a cumbersome trilogy of stories hampered by an uninspired villain and a lack of time available to truly do justice to their high concepts. Mark Gatiss tried his best but came up with a flop in The Empress of Mars at a point when the series desperately needed to recapture the attention of fans and the peculiar but lyrical Eaters of Light wasn't quite the crowd-pleaser to acheive this either. The finale was well received with an opening part which was fuelled by guts, cheek and a number of well placed chess pieces but it promised more than its successor could deliver.
I stand by Season 10 overall. It's probably Moffat's strongest since his first (as much as I personally loved Season 9's two-parter approach.) It is carried along by a brilliant companion who binds together one of the most amusing TARDIS teams in a long time. It also pays off the Missy story arc for her fans but although every scene with her is a blast it's a little bit let down by Moffat's trademark style of - promise the world and deliver the punchline to a joke. I'll personally be returning to such excellent episodes as The Pilot, Thin Ice, Oxygen and Extremis whilst privately relishing the idiosyncrasies of the flawed Eaters of Light. So for these reasons it's been a worthwhile ride with the Who-mythology expanded and retread in an entertaining, if sometimes underwhelming tenth series. Bring on the new blood, but thank you Moffat. It's been a blast.
*In the interest of completion I'd like to announce that in the place of a "Thirteenth Doctor Announced!" article I shall be giving my opinions in footnote form. I don't have any opinions on Jodie Whitaker's casting as I have not seen her playing Doctor Who yet. Anyone mentioning the letters "S" "J" or "W" will be reminded that Sarah-Jane's surname was Smith and anyone mentioning a "Liberal Agenda" will be asked to pick their toys up and put them back in the pram.
