DOCTOR WHO
Time, gentlemen, please
What we thought of Peter Capaldi’s last appearance in the TARDIS – until Christmas.
UK Broadcast BBC One, finished US Broadcast BBC America, finished Episodes Reviewed 10.01-10.12
There’s a paradox at the heart of this latest series of Doctor Who. A last stand for its star Peter Capaldi and a victory lap for its showrunner, it’s also a rebirth, a slate-wipe, an outreach to viewers who may have strayed from the faith in recent years.
“The Pilot” makes for an astonishingly fresh opener, as far from a march to the gallows as it’s possible to imagine. Channelling the early Russell T Davies era in its pure approachability, it downplays all that knotty Who mythology in favour of a plateful of chips and the simple joy of discovering a battered blue box is bigger on the inside. Powered by Pearl Mackie’s endearing turn as Bill – she’s the best thing about this entire run, eclipsing even Capaldi as the charismatic heart of the show – it’s a confident, energised piece of TV that returns the series to first principles, reinvigorating the format by restating it.
The next few episodes maintain this energy and directness, wheeling through the standard possibilities of Doctor Who: far-future trip, historical adventure, haunted house yarn. Yes, there are some overfamiliar storytelling tics – we never need to see a malfunctioning medical program ever again – but elsewhere what could feel well-worn becomes new again. “Thin Ice” targets uncomfortable social truths behind Doctor Who’s dress-up romps in the past, while vacuum-set chiller “Oxygen” puts a smart, technological spin on the zombie concept.
The mystery of the Doctor’s vault is an intriguing background hum in these early episodes. The mid-season revelation that it’s Missy behind that door feels oddly deflating, just a little too obvious, but then it could never live up to the possibilities we’ve been doodling in the margins of these stories (it’s Omega, right? No? Romana, then?).
The Monks trilogy jettisons the winning simplicity of the first five
Returning Cybermen to their clothfaced origins is chilling
episodes in favour of something altogether more sprawling. “Extremis” is an audacious, entertaining opener, plunging the Doctor into Dan Brown territory with some killer humour and a bold virtual reality rug-pull. But while “The Pyramid At The End Of The World” maintains the turbo-charged airport thriller scale, “The Lie Of The Land” feels like an underpowered coda to this high-concept trilogy. The cowled, cadaver-faced Monks make for a fantastic visual but as antagonists they feel as emaciated as their appearance (do they even have a single line in “Lie”?).
“Empress Of Mars” and “The Eaters Of Light” return to the standalone format and feel reliably trad, the former playing to Mark Gatiss’s strengths in its mix of cod-Victoriana and Target book thrills. “World Enough And Time”, meanwhile, launches Steven Moffat’s endgame in brilliantly macabre style, fusing brainmelting hard SF – a starship reversing from a black hole, accumulating layers of time like geological strata – with a landscape of smoke-belching streets and grimy, industrial hospitals redolent of early David Lynch. By returning the Cybermen to their cloth-faced, surgery-based origins the story makes them genuinely chilling again, not just a retrogasm for fans.
It’s a pity that final episode “The Doctor Falls” reduces the Cybermen to cannon fodder. But the season closer has other demands on its mind. Delivering a bleak but ultimately hopeful farewell to Bill, it also sets up an extended goodbye to Capaldi, whose speech about being motivated by kindness should stand as the Twelfth Doctor’s epitaph, if not a mission statement for the show itself. Nick Setchfield