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This is the Fusion Patrol podcast.
Each week, we look at a different science fiction TV episode or movie
and overanalyze it to within an inch of its life.
Welcome to the discussion.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Fusion Patrol. I'm Eugene.
And I'm Simon.
Tonight we're kicking off our 2020 Doctor Who coverage with the two-part story, Spyfall, by the Chibbers himself, Chris Chibnall.
Episode synopsis, and there are two episodes.
Part 1. Operatives are attacked all over the world by strange creatures pushing for the walls.
The doctor and her fam, and if I never hear the word fam again it will be too soon,
are collected by C, head of MI6. The agents have all had their DNA rewritten,
and that can only be unearthly technology. The world calls on the doctor to save them.
The only clue, all the operatives were following up leads associated with Daniel Barton, CEO of Vore, the nightmare technology company that started as the world's most successful search engine and then branched out into servers, phones, home automation, and anything else you could think of.
You know, like Google, only fictional, supposedly.
The Doctor wants to enlist the aid of Horizon Watcher, the MI6 agent known only as O, that is apart from being known as the Horizon Watcher, who operated MI6's X-Files until C fired him.
C is killed by a sniper shot, and the glowing aliens attack the Doctor and the gang, but they escape in the TARDIS.
The doctor drops Yaz and Ryan off in San Francisco, where they are to do some undercover digging into Barton, while she and Graham travel to the Australian outback to confer with O.
Using spy gear, Yaz and Ryan first manage to finagle an interview with Barton in the guise of journalists, then forge his ID and break into his office to download the info on his computer.
Interesting side note, a scan of Barton's DNA reveals he's only 93% human.
In his office, they are almost caught, but they learn that Barton is working with or for the aliens.
In the Outback, the Doctor and O confer, but the glowing aliens attack.
They manage to escape, taking O with them and infiltrate Barton's enormously convenient birthday party.
After the Doctor confronts him, Barton goes on the run, eventually flying off in his private jet.
The Doctor and the gang manage to get on the plane, but then the big reveal.
O isn't O after all, nor is he the Horizon Watcher.
He's the master.
He's in league with Barton and the aliens, and there's a bomb on the plane.
The master leaves with the aliens just as the bomb goes off,
and the doctor is somehow transported to another place.
End of episode one.
Part two.
On board the frontless plane, Ryan finds several plaques with his name and info on them,
leading him to a recorded instructions and software from the doctor to gain control of the plane
and let it fly automatically to its original destination.
The doctor, alone in the strange place, meets Ada, a 19th century woman,
who apparently visits frequently, but knows not why.
She helps the doctor escape back to 1834 London,
where the master attempts to kill the doctor unsuccessfully.
The doctor meets Ada's associate, Charles Babbage,
And like a calculating machine, the doctor puts two and two together and realizes this is Ada Lovelace, pioneer of computer algorithms.
There's a weird sculpture called the Silver Lady and Babbage's Study, which we, the audience, had seen in Barton's office in the 21st century,
which the doctor deduces is a MacGuffin and sonics it, causing her and Ada to be transported to 1943 Paris,
where they meet Noor Khan, British agent, and are pursued by Nazis led by, you guessed it, the Master.
Back in the future, Graham, Yaz, and Ryan are on the run.
Barton has brought the full weight of his technology to bear on them,
and they are tracked, wanted for hijacking, and on the run in a surveillance state.
Graham takes them somewhere he thinks is off the grid, but he is wrong.
The aliens find them, but they're saved by Graham's soft shoe dance routine,
and a pair of laser shoes borrowed from MI6.
The doctor arranges to meet with the master on the Eiffel Tower,
where he can't help but blab a bit about how he found out about the aliens,
gave them a better plan, will destroy the human race,
then dispose of the aliens when they're no longer used to him.
He also drops a bit about Gallifrey being destroyed.
Again, but he doesn't elaborate.
The doctor has laid a trap, giving the Nazis false information
that the master is a double agent for the British,
And the Nazis are coming.
The Dr. Ada and Noor escape in the Master's TARDIS.
Graham, Yaz, and Ryan think they've been clever,
allowing themselves to be located by Barton's team,
then capturing their car and using the GPS to take them to Barton's base,
which is an empty warehouse with the dead body of his mother.
Barton killed her earlier because he has mommy issues.
Barton is giving a speech, and he reveals to the whole world
how terribly stupid and naive they've all been,
giving his company access to everything about their lives, their location, their family, their friends, thoughts, bank accounts, children, everything.
And now that he has all that, he implements the plot, which has virtually nothing to do with any of that.
He's just using their phones to rewrite their DNA and turn the entire human race into DNA-based hard drives
to store the aliens' massive porn collection, or whatever it is that they need to store,
on unreliable, organic, prone-to-mutate, age-and-wear-out hard drives.
But that doesn't work because the Doctor fixed it all to not work off-screen between scenes.
She also reveals the Master's perfidy to the aliens,
and they get upset taking him with them back into exile in their own universe.
The Doctor makes a brief stop at Gallifrey to discover that it has been destroyed,
and gets a recorded message from the Master saying that he actually destroyed Gallifrey
because they lied to him about all their nature, and it really upset him.
The end.
All right. I want to say that this episode, I just want to start this off by saying that this episode reminded me so, so very much of Patrick Troughton's classic episode story, The War Games.
And the reason it reminded me of the War Games is because if you sit and watch the War Games back to back, episode to episode, it's one hell of a slog to get through.
And it took me something like eight hours to rewatch this.
I had to just keep stopping.
I sort of enjoyed it on the first watch.
On the second watch, I had real problems.
So this one went way down on me fast.
Anyway, how much did you love the episode?
Because I bet you loved it.
You expect me to talk?
Yeah.
No.
I expect you to.
I don't expect you to die.
Well, I mean, I expect you to have your DNA rewritten.
All right.
Go ahead.
Well, I've got to admit, I wasn't really shaken or stirred by this one.
saving that one okay
i've i've i've now firmly got the idea in my head that chibnall should stick to writing one
part because the thing about this two-part episode is it's got more than two episodes in it
but it's just a big jumble um yeah so i i mean there could there could have been an interesting
there could have been an interesting bond parody in there i i was definitely looking forward to an
interesting bond parody there could have been a resurrection of the master story though i'll come
back to some issues i have with that um okay you know the the dna the dna stuff there is some
potential there i mean i we've been sharing examples of of uh storing information on dna
and using DNA as computers.
And certainly I saw this thing a couple of years ago
about moving images being encoded onto DNA
and then being fed to bacteria.
And so, yeah, there's something in that story too.
I've been trying to avoid spoilers,
but since part of this episode
was literally shot feet from my office,
it was not necessarily easy to escape the knowledge that some of this series was going to be set in 1943 Paris.
And I was looking forward to the...
Did you work in 1943 Paris?
Exactly so. Exactly so, yes.
I have to commute there every day.
Oh, okay.
Each year it gets a little further away.
But that was something I was looking forward to.
and I had assumed we were going to get a whole episode set there.
So I thought that would be really interesting.
And, you know, again, Ada Lovelace, yeah, brilliant.
But I kind of felt, although there were things I did love in this story,
I kind of felt that putting it all together did make for pretty hard going.
So, I mean, I'm not sure I agree with you about the War Games,
but I certainly did find re-watching this a bit of a slog.
Well, I do love the war games,
but if you try to watch all 10 parts...
Sure.
In a sitting.
I haven't tried to do that in a sitting.
In fairness, if you try to watch all 10 parts in a sitting,
you must be watching about four hours of television.
Yeah.
Whereas this only felt like it was more than four hours of television.
Yes, it did.
Even watching it the first time through,
it was like, wow, I have to go to the bathroom now.
And you put it on pause and you just look and you go,
I still got 30 minutes to go.
I mean, are they both one hour long?
Yeah, they're both full hours.
So that doesn't just make it a long Doctor Who episode,
which 60 minutes is, that's two long Doctor Who episodes.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's, yes, it's a pretty, I don't know,
It's sort of, it's journey's end, stolen planet long, I guess.
It kind of reminds me of, it kind of reminds me of later Bond films because they're just too damn long.
Yeah.
Maybe that's the homage.
That's the homage.
In some way, doesn't it?
Yeah.
That's the homage.
We will make this really, no, actually there is one thing I will say.
Get out, get it out of the way.
I think I kind of like the new theme to the series.
I found the music to the previous season to be uninspiring, unnoticeable, unrecognizable.
I have the soundtrack.
I listen to the soundtrack.
And it's like, yeah, this doesn't bother me.
I think you should be sitting in a room with some Himalayan salt crystals, perhaps, and chanting.
but it never it never conveys it never conveys emotions to me or or events or action or it's
it's very and i never heard it i think there were two instances in the origin in last year that i
noticed there was music and i noticed it immediately in this episode because they were definitely going
for the david arnold era bond sound i know i have to i have to disagree with that um because i was
i was really struck by the similarities to the sky for i could get this right skyfall score that um
thomas newman isn't it uh wrote that yeah really there was there were there were themes when i
when I when I compared them there were themes in the Skyfall score that I thought Akinola had
actually I mean he hasn't they're not they're not direct copies but they're so reminiscent that it
if you weren't sure which one you were listening to I could have gone well I could that could have
gone either way I'm not a fan of Newman's Bond scores to be fair Skyfall was well I'm a I'm a
I'm a huge fan of Arnold scores and you know I was looking forward to hearing what Sagan Akinola was
going to do with this and I have to say I enjoyed it but a tiny little bit of me was disappointed
in the fact that we hadn't done a Bond spoof while Murray Gold was still scoring it
because I would have loved to hear what Murray Gold did with Bond and you know in some ways
I think there's a huge amount of similarity between Gold's work and Arnold's work I think
that they are mates and they you know they they probably have influenced each other but um it
would it would just have been interesting to hear what what gold did riffing on the kind of arnold
stuff i think it would have been more up his alley yeah yes i mean he naturally i think his his stuff
is more bombastic and that's very much the the kind of the arnold bond style and and and it's
i think it's very appropriate to to bond um i i also enjoyed gold's doctor who scores so you know
don't get me wrong it's not the most part of criticism yeah well all right let's let's skip
that since then we've we've just finished pretty much all the bond stuff right no well no i i i
have um i have quite specific complaints about the bond stuff which is well where the hell was it
i mean if you're going to if you're going to do a bond okay so there was there was some bond stuff
there was the doctor in a tux there was the doctor saying is that was that really a tux
well so in the attempt at doing in that outfit she made patrick trout and look tall
it was it was a definite homage she was the doctor the doctor we did get that uh high speed chase
through the the uh grapevines most of that was already in the trailer so that was kind of like
that was already priced in i don't know i was expecting at least there to be i mean if the
doctor isn't clearly you've got a problem with you're dealing with a family audience and so a
lot of bond stuff is out of bounds maybe you can't have the doctor drinking vodka martinis or
whatever but they could at least have mixed her some sort of um mocktail that could have been
ginger beer shaken not stirred anything but exactly and probably a mistake but yeah and
and and you know i think there were i think there were lots of things you could have done with it
um you know the the q branch stuff i was hoping for yeah we had some uh the the bling
except sort of nothing happened with it nothing happened with it i mean not much okay there was
a bit of laser shoe action in the second episode but the end of the first episode the id generator
was the oh yeah yeah yeah all right um it was it was kind of pretty minimal because it got swamped
under a load of storyline about time travel and what have you which really doesn't fit in a in a
bond story now i don't mind a story about time travel this is doctor who after all but if you're
going to do the bond stuff this is why i'm like okay if you haven't got enough bond stuff to do
over two episodes do one episode do a bond story that is a decent pastiche of a bond story and then
move on to the other stuff here's my other complaint the spy stuff is it's not just that
it they didn't do the bond stuff it's irrelevant it's utterly irrelevant to this story the the
fact that well it depends what you say the story is spies i i don't know what the aliens are spies
huh and so it's all i think i really do i think that uh you know i don't know anything about mr
chibnall's habits but i could envision that perhaps on some drug or alcohol fueled circumstance
he happened to look at the back of a leclerc novel and he saw the word spy master and he went
whoa what if the master were a spy and that's where this story came from because that's the
as far as i can tell that is the sole reason there's any spy craft in this except for the
ian chesterson moment of stenography um i don't just i literally don't get it i don't think that
was a problem i don't think i don't think that you you have to have the master in a story that's
separate from a spy story because every bond story has to have the kind of no i don't have any problem
with that i'm just saying that i'm just saying that why wasn't the master didn't have there was
no reason in this there was no reason to for it to be about spies because they didn't use that
they they they just set it up so that we could get a couple of car chase and a but they could
And it really had nothing to do.
They could have, but they did not, which is my point, is that it was not constructed.
The whole point about the master is he manipulates people.
So he could have been manipulating terrestrial intelligence agencies to achieve whatever end he wanted.
I mean, it's classic Bond, you know, Moonraker Spy Who Loved Me stuff.
He could have been trying to start World War III in order to wipe out the human race for reasons.
I mean, that's what the master does.
But that wasn't what he was doing.
He wasn't actually the spymaster in any meaningful sense, because there wasn't any proper espionage story set up in this.
It was just, you know, we kick off by paying a visit to Vauxhall Cross, which, by the way, looked utterly wrong.
I mean, how did they think that that interior looked like the interior of – because they used external shots of Vauxhall Cross.
Vauxhall Cross is the MI6 headquarters?
Is that what we're saying?
Yes.
Okay.
I didn't know it had a name.
And you see it from the outside.
Right.
It's a very modern building.
And then it gets shot inside some – I suspect, though I haven't double-checked it, I suspect it's City Hall.
You know, it's quite funny because when they went in to the hospital bed and, you know, C does the handprint thing.
I very much got a Moonraker James Bond going into the nerve gas lab in Italy vibe to that scene.
Because you've got these ancient buildings and you've got the renovated interior on the inside of it.
And as I watched that, I said, you know, that's a peculiar and uniquely British thing.
Because when you watch a show made in the United States, typically the building interior and exterior match because our buildings are much newer by and large.
But it's much more common to see something British where it's clearly old style infrastructure on the building and then it's been gutted and renovated.
And I'm not saying that doesn't happen here, but certainly it doesn't happen in Los Angeles much in Hollywood.
And I actually thought that at that moment.
Never occurred to me that the MI6 building wasn't an ancient building.
And I know it isn't, but it just it looked absolutely quintessentially British as they went in that in that room.
It fit perfectly in my mind, but you do make a perfectly good point.
Well, I've never been inside it, but it didn't look like the interiors that we see.
Or if you had, you couldn't tell us.
Bond films.
Given that was what they were trying to spoof, that was a bit remiss.
Yeah, so I'm not particularly happy with the spy story on this, such as it is.
I'm disappointed by the lack of it.
Okay, fair enough.
I think that's the same.
I'm disappointed in its execution because they didn't.
Yes.
They didn't execute it.
I mean, that's where I'm getting at.
Let's talk about the Vore and the Google parallels.
And maybe we can think of Kablam a little bit from last year.
Because I saw a lot of parallel here.
They're made out to be awful.
I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that's just not about Vore that remind us of this whole privacy thing.
Like when Graham is doing his medical exam, which is basically an irrelevant scene, and they make him tick the boxes for his data protection privacy stuff.
I mean, the dad and the home, well, the Echo-like device.
It is an Alexa, specifically.
Was it?
Yeah, I guess it was.
It wasn't a Vore Machine.
He says Alexa.
Good point.
He did.
He did say that.
I hope they were trying to mess up everybody's Alexa all over the world by doing that.
Because they're all like playing Rubber Soul by the Beatles right now.
Or looking for a shoe shop somewhere.
there may not be how awful this is how terrible how devastating it would be if a company used that
against you okay fine and we get a little of that when they're chasing gram and yaz and company
but that's not what the plot is about he gets he gets the whole speech and he tells you about how
terrible we are and how awful and what you've let us do and ha ha we've got you now because we know
everything about you. None of that's relevant to the actual plan, which is as long as you've got
a phone, I'm going to format your hard drive. All it, yeah. Well, no, I mean, yeah. I noted you
mentioned it in the synopsis. I was infuriated by it in the story because, again, it's an
interesting story you could do a story that was actually about in the way in which you're handing
over all of your personal information and allowing companies to invade your privacy without necessarily
thinking through the consequences and you could demonstrate some of those consequences and yet
there was no demonstration of the consequences because as you say this is something that could
have been done without you clicking on all of those agree whatever because it it's not like
clicking on agree somehow makes it legal for you to have your DNA written over. It may have
terrible, terrible, but those are not the consequences. Those are not the consequences.
It's complete non sequitur. And it's so unsubtle. It's so unsubtle.
Yeah. I just sat and had so many problems in things like that. All right. The concept of DNA
as a hard drive, this is a thing that has been postulated. DNA contains information.
And it has, yeah, well, it's happened. It's been done.
It's happened. And obviously not like that and not to that degree. But let's just take a couple
of ideas here. One, according to what I could find, the theoretical number is that a single
gram of DNA could contain 215 petabytes of data, which is 215 million gigabytes. Moore's law of
computers, which is not really a law, but basically computing power and capacity increase double every
two years. We'll pass that in not that long. So advanced aliens really are humans a logical
extension. But Morslaw doesn't see how we'll parse it. It might be that we parse it by
using DNA storage. Well, it's possible, but does it make sense? Because if you took,
okay, let's see, do you take a human being and you rewrite their DNA and you turn them into a
hard drive? You've got one big hard drive, which is still a biological entity, which will wear out,
which will mutate, which will no longer be able to replicate.
So you've created a planet full of failing hard drives immediately.
And how do they eat?
And how do they stay alive?
Because they're not put in a hospital like those secret agents were
and kept alive with a drip.
They're all going to fall over and starve to death in a couple of days.
All of them.
Yes.
Stupid.
Because there are a lot of interesting things about that.
One of which is, oh God, right. I don't quite know where to start. Let's start with the secret agent. So the secret agent is being kept alive, but the doctor says something like, there is nothing to keep alive. But actually, there is because she may no longer be human because her DNA has been rewritten, but she's a living organism with DNA.
So there is that. Now, obviously, it might be possible to read out of DNA after something has died. But since we don't quite know how these DNA stories, we don't know how they're going to be used.
what that brings me to is what i think is a is a bigger problem i mean the eating is certainly an
issue how do you how do you keep alive yes yes yes yes yes um and do how much of you how much
of your dna needs to from what i understand and bear in mind i understand almost nothing of this
but from what i understand the dna experiment from a couple of years ago encoding this
this um video would were done using the the way your immune system uh builds in the code of viruses
in order to know to resist them in the future so you've got to have you've got to still have some
functioning biological systems so here's the big one there is a statement in it which says
that human DNA is vastly more efficient at storing this stuff. Why?
Yeah, no, it isn't. It isn't. I think when they are saying it's efficient,
what they're trying to say, not trying to make excuses, but I think what they are trying to say
is that DNA in such a small space contains so much potential data that is quote unquote efficiency.
But it doesn't have to be human DNA.
The fact is it isn't efficient.
No, right.
It could be animals.
It doesn't have to be human DNA.
It doesn't have to be living DNA that you rewrite.
It does.
I mean, it really depends what you're storing on it.
And the question is, at what point is it that you're transferring?
Because you don't have to reformat, as Barton says.
You don't have to reformat.
What you've got there is already capable of storing information.
So why not just transfer the information?
And there may be consequences to that.
Stuff may get overwritten in that.
There may be horrific things that we can explore in a dramatic way.
But I kind of feel like I don't necessarily want a computer biology lesson dumped on me,
but I just need something more than this nonsense.
Okay, so I think a couple of things here.
One, if we're talking about shows that look at the real possibilities of the privacy or DNA or something, you've got to turn to Black Mirror, not Doctor Who.
Two, I think that there's a much better way that they could have implemented this.
And they did, but then they ignored it.
And that was Barton's 7%.
Right?
Barton's 7%.
This is steganography written onto the human being.
yes yes yes and there's your spy craft and there is your tie to something that they use
superfluously in the episode for no apparent reason other than just i wanted to tell you
about steganography because i just found out about it and then the third thing is oh god yeah
writing onto dna as a way of as a way of smuggling information around it's a fascinating idea the
third one is this is the return of the writer being beaten by the stupid science stick which
know if we've seen since Kill the Moon, but this one. Yeah, no, I actually kind of thought that
they might be going that way. Well, no, I didn't. I couldn't have thought they were going that way
because there is absolutely no clue given to what they're using the DNA for until literally the
moment when he says, by the way, we're going to format you. Yes. Right. There's nothing given.
So you can't be looking at this episode going, oh, the steganography ties with the fact that they're rewriting the DNA.
And if they'd said they were storing information in it, then suddenly you could have put the pieces together.
But they did not do that.
On rewatch, you can put that together.
Just like on rewatch, you can realize that when C is killed, his last word is O.
And when the creatures are forming the lights on the wall of the building for Ryan, for no apparent reason, they form the letter O.
But it serves no purpose in the story.
No.
Well, I did.
I wondered if C saying O was supposed to be somehow he'd realized it was O, but there is no obvious way in which he'd realized it was O.
So it wasn't neat enough to allow that.
No, it's just, it's just a, you know, it's just, just bad. It's just bad. But yeah, it is an interesting idea if an agent could, you know, rewrite a bit of the DNA in their finger or something and get through the checkpoints with the secret information.
I don't think it's as efficient as sending it via the internet, hidden in a picture or something, but still, it's...
No, but on the other hand, handing someone something in a lunchbox and photograph with their magic glasses isn't really the kind of epitome of.
Well, that was that was their homage to spying.
Did they say did see say that that spies had been intercepted?
He did, didn't he?
Yes.
I don't know if this is just a slap at the Americans again or the fact that the American operative was in fact a sniper killing someone.
Oh, yeah.
Not really spying.
That looked more like military services, special forces trying to take out a bad guy and not somebody investigating Daniel Barton.
Yeah.
Another thing about this story that I did not like,
the doctor solves the problem off the screen,
which I alluded to.
Yeah.
The aliens are time traveling.
They exist in multiple times.
So why are they keeping track of people developing computer technology on
earth?
I mean,
the two things against it.
One,
why?
we never get a why to that and two if they travel through time do you really need to stake out ada
lovelace when you could just hop into the future and see i think i'm right frankly so much more
advanced than ada lovelace you know all all props to her but you know it's it's simplistic compared
to what we have and know now okay easily accessible i might have a bit of an answer to that we we can
just before we do final question on the dna thing following on from the the spy who as we say is
still alive but has dna rewritten why is barton's mom dead well she was completely rewritten so
so she's dead um it's like um but she it's not just it's it's like it's not just when they when
they scan the agent from the plane they say she's effectively dead or some words to that effect
right but she's in she's in what looks like a coma but yaz takes one look at the mum and goes no
you know she's she's carked it that's that's not because that's the the
oh boy well because it because it was badly written that's your answer it's badly written
it's inconsistent across the board here's the thing here's the thing then about ada lovelace
okay there's a small there's a small spoiler here i'm i'm i'm very averse to getting spoilers about
new doctor who before it comes up on the on the telly and there is there is one thing i have
heard a rumor about which i'm now going to relate if you want to avoid spoilers
close your ears now um we are supposed to be getting an episode in which the doctor meets
mary shelley and that's slightly worrying because they're related um what oh no what you mean
because um ada lovelace yeah because ada lovelace is byron's daughter however that wasn't that
wasn't what i was right is the worry is that um shelley has been a companion to the doctor
in the past on audio and will the tv series too will hmm ada lovelace too has been a companion
adventure with tom baker's doctor the enchantress of numbers yes so happens in the future from this
this is the thing we're all worrying about what's going to happen with with uh mary shelley and then
we get this popping up and it might appear to be a problem because as in it breaks continuity
and people say oh yeah time war no problem but the doctor this is this is ada ada byron before
she marries the earl of lovelace and becomes ada lovelace so she wouldn't know the doctor and
Anyway, the Doctor is in a different body, so that's not a problem.
The problem is the Doctor doesn't know Ada Lovelace.
This may not actually be a problem either,
because the Enchantress of Numbers involves a big reset,
and it's not clear to me that the Doctor and Anne
actually remember anything from the story.
That's possible.
I haven't listened to the subsequent adventures
to see if they refer back to having met Ada Lovelace,
So I don't quite know if that fixes the continuity.
But, you know, that's like, okay, that's not so.
So in a way, Chibnall seems to have respected the audio stories.
But not only that, I am 97, maybe 98% certain
that he is familiar with the Enchantress of Numbers
because he included a line from it.
In the Enchantress of Numbers, Ada says to the Doctor,
I'm not a fool, don't take me for one.
And in Spyfall, Ada says to the Doctor,
I'm not a fool, Doctor.
And she says, and I'm not treating you as one.
Yeah.
Coincidence?
Could be.
I think not.
I think not, but it could be.
Now the relevance...
Maybe they've got a plagiarism charge against him.
Maybe they can file plagiarism charges against Chibnall.
Well, I'm not sure that either the idea of using Ada Lovelace
would be protected by copyright, nor a line like that. I certainly didn't see Paul Morris and
Simon Barnard credited in the episode, but I think for one line. The thing that I think you might
be more concerned with filing plagiarism charges is, so let's go back to where we started here.
What's the explanation for why the Kasavin are monitoring people involved in the history of
throughout time. They never give that. Well, the plot to the Enchantress of Numbers is that there
is a war in the 8th millennium. This, again, spoilers for if you haven't heard the Enchantress
of Numbers, obviously, there is a war in the 8th millennium between computers and mankind,
which mankind narrowly win but the computers uh try to go back in time to change history in order to
implant a virus that is going to be present throughout the development of computers etc
load of absolute poppycock but it but it it is connected to this idea of there being um
future agents concerned with the early development of computing and i kind of think well if you if
you're certain that gibner what is familiar with that story and he's thinking about a story involving
ada lovelace and he's thinking about a plot that gives him an excuse for going back it's kind of
there in that the problem is it doesn't link to the rest of the story that he's telling and all
the all the other cassava and bomb nonsense i'm sure we haven't seen the end of the vor
well i mean i wish we'd seen the end of the vor no he's still gone yeah he just he just
i think the vor will be back i think i think that mysterious kelp forest that they all got
stranded in i think that will be back for some reason i i thought that the choices of the actors
or the directors, when everybody went to that place, it really freaked them out.
And I don't see why.
I mean, instantly, boom, I'm like really terrified.
Like, okay, if I were just plopped in that place, I would be terrified.
If I'd been traveling in the TARDIS for a year and all sorts of terrifying and horrific
places, I don't think I would have quite the reaction that Yaz had.
I don't think I would have the reaction.
Certainly the doctor seemed really, really more concerned.
She wasn't interested.
Hey, this is an interesting new place, is it?
She immediately went to, I'm talking to myself.
I'm so afraid.
Doesn't make any sense.
Unless that's supposed to be something that the doctor knows or that's deep in your psyche or the home of the timeless child or I don't know or care.
Even the master, when he ended up there, it was, I mean, yeah, he was mad, but also, I don't know.
I don't know.
It just didn't, something's not right, but I know we're not going to, that's not the end of the Vore.
Well, I don't know.
I'd like to think because it's a different dimension.
The sense you're supposed to get is, well, the sense I felt that the intention behind it was,
was to say the people transferred into it somehow it somehow it was intended to give a sense of
being in a different dimension if you were in a different dimension it would be very different
and if you felt like that i mean the aliens aren't stable in ours why are we stable in theirs
well exactly but i i feel i feel that um one one of the things about that is an overall weakness
with is it is it with the whole episode i the whole story i don't know i felt like the direction
so this is this is um this this isn't a two-parter in some ways because there is one director for
episode one and a different director for episode two so they're written by the same person but
and then continue i assume that's a logistical thing yeah i guess so i felt that the direction
in part two was just awful awful and all all all the more apparent because some some some some of
the things that you could compare between them like i thought lenny henry's performance in episode one
was really good he was he was properly sinister he appeared to be just phoning it in an episode
two in fact everyone in episode two appeared to be in a different story they didn't appear to be
well that's not quite true there were some there were some scenes um where i thought the actors
themselves did a a good job because you know they were they were sharing a scene so uh you know the
doctor and the master on the eiffel tower whatever that was great um but just the the tone between
scenes was all over the shop um the way this is it this is a classic i think the way that the scene
where barton does his and one more thing product reveal that that's supposed to be like apple slick
that event right right that's not it looks like the director just shot it on an empty sound stage
and hid the fact by pointing a few lights at the camera the this the seating looks like something
out of a lecture theatre there's hardly anyone there it's you know it's a tiny audience and and
and the worst bit is this is the bit at the end i mean it there's some really poor editing as well
but when the master and Barton realise that the thing has gone wrong, and Barton just walks down
towards the door and says, I need an extraction now, the timing of it feels wrong. It's not clear
how he realises that it's got wrong, or what happens to him in that moment, or how he goes from
I'm halfway through this to I'm, I need to get out of here.
And there's no, there's, there's no emotion to it.
There's no urgency to it.
There's just, it's like,
he doesn't really know what kind of performance he's being expected to give
there.
It's not good.
You did.
It did jog something in my mind with regards to the directing and it had to
do with him on the plane.
And it's not about the directing, but that made me think of it.
I started to mention it earlier, right?
The doctor solves the problem with the silver lady off screen.
Yeah.
She uses her TARDIS or she uses a TARDIS.
She arrives before the story takes place.
She puts a virus in it.
Therefore, nothing's going to happen.
Problem solved.
Now, if you've got a time machine, sure, maybe you can do that.
Why don't they do that every story?
Why don't they do that all the time?
Why don't they never, ever have a problem?
Why did Ryan, why did she fix them on the plane?
I hated that, that she went back in time after the whole thing was solved and saved Ryan and the gang's life.
And more than that, why, if she was going to do that, why would she put plaques all the way, like going,
Ryan, basically, Ryan, go to the next aisle.
Oh, okay, no, go to the next aisle.
No, okay, now look in the seat pocket of 13C.
Like, why not just put it in all the seat pockets?
Or why not say the same thing on all the plaques?
Or what?
It's just there to be whimsically stupid.
And I hate it.
I really, like, they're concentrating more on what's happening and not on any kind of logic or internal sense.
They don't care. Literally, they don't care that the doctor solved this problem off screen 10 months ago.
I don't care about that because it's not a problem I care about.
I mean, the problems I think occur a lot earlier than that.
You should. And that's a failure of the story to make you care about the problem.
And that's part of it is that the writer doesn't care. So why should we?
And if you go down that path, that if you can just solve any problem after the fact, then there is no time war.
Oh, wait, that's because they tried to do that.
But it's just...
Wouldn't she go back and it put plaques on the freighter in Earthshock?
Yes.
See, there you go.
We can solve all these problems now.
Yeah.
Throughout the rest of the entire series, it's all over because they can just go back and fix it before it ever happens.
Before we talk about the Master, and I think we should talk about the Master, and obviously this one's going to run a little long.
We probably should.
I want to say, I have never heard of Noor Khan.
Yeah.
Have you?
Is that something they teach about?
No.
Okay.
I wasn't sure if that was like every school child in Britain knows who this woman is or
whether this was a, hey, every school child in Britain ought to know about this woman.
So did you do any research on her after you watched this episode?
Yes.
Not much, but yes.
either the wikipedia article is a hatchet job which it might be or this is not the woman that
they should be throwing up there because what does it sound okay all right i put it together
it goes like this one she was from a muslim india prior to prior to the uh split so i guess that
would make probably ultimately Pakistan, but half American. She is a pacifist, follower of Gandhi.
She and her brother, both pacifists, joined the war effort partially because they wanted to,
noble reasons, don't get me wrong, partially because they wanted to show England, Britain,
India cooperating, strengthen ties, do their part for the war, the whole thing.
Knowing that she would get an extremely dangerous job because as a pacifist,
They couldn't go out and kill people.
So they had to basically be in the line of getting killed, I guess.
She went through the training.
The women's courier program was working really well where they were sending couriers in and
the Nazis weren't noticing the women because, you know, women, right?
And so they went to the radio operator program and went training.
Her file, which they found after she was dead, her trainer said basically,
Um, she's not overburdened with brains, but has worked hard and shows keenness.
And then his boss wrote in the margins of the paper, nonsense.
We don't want them overburdened with brains.
So they put her in France in June of 1943.
She was arrested in October of 1943 after having been betrayed by a double agent in the French resistance.
So she was only there for a short period of time.
She did not talk under interrogation.
Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Did not talk under interrogation.
However, she apparently kept logs and transcripts of every message that she sent against orders because apparently she was not overburdened with brains.
So the Nazis got that.
were able to fake her and for apparently quite some time were sending fake messages as her
and got quite a few people killed because of that stupid, stupid mistake on her part.
She tried to escape and got captured.
That was in November of 43.
They then put her in prison for 10 months, shackled hand and foot,
and then they beat her and killed her.
So it was not a good end.
It's kind of an iffy war record.
I mean, yes, a pioneer.
Well, hang on.
But yes, a brave person.
Yes, doing a dangerous job and died because of it and all that stuff.
But I mean, they couldn't find somebody whose war record didn't end with her getting a bunch of people killed because she didn't follow procedure.
Like I say, I read the Wikipedia.
I'm like, wow, that's a hatchet job.
somebody must have hated her maybe you know it may not be true a lot of wikipedia i don't i can't
prove it's not true but just it just didn't come off as good as it could i'm i see i i still i mean
with that with that backstory i still don't i still think she's really interesting character
and the things that are interesting about her they don't really have to do with how
intelligent her superiors thought she was or whether she did or didn't follow procedure even
if you know even if she made procedural mistakes that led to other people being killed
i mean you could you could explore those things the thing that bugged me about so i didn't do a
whole lot of research into her but i did look up what happened next and that's kind of because
there is that moment when the doctor returns her and she asks do the fascists ever win
and the doctor says not while there's people like you now i don't know what you think the idea of
the fascists winning might be but if you know you're going to end up in a concentration camp
and then get executed by them you might feel that that's definitely round one to them yeah so not
ever win i don't know i mean i'm not saying change the line what i think what i think is missing is
you need to know why the doctor is saying that i think if you if you put that that character with
that story up there you need to know what happened to her and i didn't know what happened to her based
on what i saw on screen we didn't know much without knowing without knowing what happened to her and
the doctor undoubtedly does know when she says you know not while there are people like you
and so i feel which won't be for long i needed to see that i you know in watching through it
i feel like you as a member of the audience could be forgiven if you thought she had something to
do with computers or that it was tied into the fact that she's just doing with lovelace um you
know why why did they drop into this point and land right next to her because the kasavin were
monitoring her as a spy were they i don't know i i didn't actually get that and and you know
the silver lady wasn't there and uh i that was that that was my interpretation though i don't
know why see that's why i say you'd be loving the doctor's hand would result in her ending up
i i don't you could be forgiven for that also and i think there's a difference between the way the
british use the word brilliant and the way americans use the word brilliant when you hear
somebody say somebody's brilliant here it 99.9 percent time means intelligent no and it i know
it's not true because you know brilliant could also mean shining bright so when the doctor is
what it means for us what what does it tell you i don't i don't think it necessarily means
intelligent it can do that's what i mean that's what i mean so when the doctor says she's brilliant
like you my mind immediately went she's brilliant like ada lovelace a brilliantly intelligent human
being but yeah and so therefore she would be of interest to the vor but it isn't what she meant
and then as that falls apart you're like why did they go there i don't like i don't get that i mean
is it just literally random plunk?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.
See, I don't know.
I don't know.
It's a story that I would have happily
had a proper episode around.
Yes.
You know, Noor and I can't
is an interesting character.
The period is interesting.
Give us a whole episode there
and do it properly.
Yeah.
Plus, I've got to say,
one of the things I loved in this story
was both both actors were really good i liked the way the characters were portrayed i liked them
traveling with the doctor when when she said uh when um ada says does this have to have to be the
end i kind of think i wish it didn't i wish actually we did have the doctor traveling with
ada and nor and given that there doesn't seem to be much fam development occurring at the moment
i mean i mean apart from the budding romance between yaz and ryan but okay well maybe i
wasn't quite sure whether that was just wasn't sure whether that was the direction
oh my mother my sister wants your phone number is the classic flag signal cliche that they're
getting together later in this yeah no well yes yes i suppose that is in the right there was there
was that and there was the when they're sitting on the veranda and he says i'd never let that
happen to you yeah in reference to her dying quite how you stop someone from ever dying but still do
you think she's not even really yes anymore i mean there's no being in the other transfer yeah
yeah she substituted for somebody else a spy i did i did i did wonder why they didn't
check her out that whole sequence makes no sense i thought she's there and then she's back okay
i thought she was because we saw how she transferred but i what i didn't understand
was why the doctor and o didn't immediately think there was a kasavin there there is now
yas there isn't it kasavin that's taking the shape of yas yeah because that's kind of what i would
think me too or something yep yep absolutely she didn't even bother to check her dna
which would be a logical thing to do considering that they had that perhaps not definitive in this
particular case right so yeah okay let's go we're running long well it's a two-part episode it's a
long episode it's going to be a long podcast the master has returned thoughts many many many thoughts
um i'm gonna i don't know quite where to start with this i i guess i guess my initial thing is
that i haven't i haven't much enjoyed the last three episodes compared to the rest of well the
whole of the previous series the the 2018 series which i thought was really really good one of the
things I liked about it was that it basically took a clean slate it didn't it didn't try and
erase the continuity of what had gone before but it didn't go there it just it just did its own
new thing quite happily and it started establishing a different kind of show which you know Doctor
Who's always done it's a show that regenerates and that's why it has the longevity it has
when um we had resolution we obviously had the first of the recurring villains well
won't go back over that um we had this stuff about uh unit being disbanded that seemed to
me completely unnecessary yeah now we've got more continuity in the shape of the master
and another thing that will no doubt come on to and so the thing that occurs to me about this is
when rtd brought back the master he earned it i'm not saying i'm not saying the rtd interpretation
of the master was great because it wasn't it was not he he'd he'd gone for well over 30 episodes
before he brought the master back and then he sowed the seeds of that resurrection through
the human nature and family of blood storyline and then utopia with derek jacobi and so forth
so there was a real sense of of build-up to it moffat he waits for 30 or so episodes before he
brings the master back and then he brings the master back with a series of teasers you know
dropped throughout the season and then the you know the master is is resurrected and okay we get
the master back a few times but that felt kind of like it'd been earned and in particular the
doctor falls felt to me like a really satisfying conclusion both to the kind of recent master arc
or the that the master arc from season uh 36 or whatever it is and to the the the longer master
story so what i'm basically trying to say is it's too soon we're bringing we're bringing back the
master without without it without it really following on from from that which really just
happened only just the other day and i'm not ready for it i'm not ready for it i i don't
my thoughts are not nearly as deep on this subject uh as as yours uh clearly are
Because I don't exactly treat it as if Doctor Who is a new show with a new Doctor.
So the Master is back.
No, I was just saying it's not a new show.
The Master came back.
The Master is back and has come back since the destruction of all the Time Lords.
That was the one that had to be earned, in my opinion.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I was coming on to it.
And it was.
Much more so because when Moffat, when RTD destroyed the Time Lords, that was after a wilderness period of nine years.
And so he was doing it for a reason.
And in connection with, you know, setting up a backstory and reestablishing a sense of what the show is about,
which is the Doctor being the last of the Time Lords,
being this kind of lonely alien who is the only one of his race and that permeated all of the
storylines so it wasn't just a random plot twist it was it was cleverly thought out for a reason
when Moffat undid that when he brought back the Time Lords he did so very carefully he did it in
consultation with Russell T Davies and he did it in a way that felt like it both honoured the Time
war story in the time war mythos that rtd had built up and and yet um it was kind of epic in
its own right the problem is now it's there is no point to any of that what was the point of
carefully bringing back gallifrey i i feel like chibbers was was i don't know i mean i don't know
what their dynamic is between him and moffat and rtd but i i'm sure he must have had a working
relationship with RTD because he worked for him on Torchwood and worked with him Torchwood. So I'm
sure that I just, it, it honestly feels like a writer throwing a tantrum. I am still mad that
Moffat brought Gallifrey back. It was such a great idea to get rid of them. I don't want to have
Time Lord stories. This is a waste of my time. What are we going to do now that they're back again?
I know I'll just blow them up for no reason whatsoever. They're just boom, they're gone.
And now it's not the doctor that killed the Time Lords.
So there's no guilt there.
It's the master that killed the Time Lords.
So we've erased the doctor's guilt about wiping them out,
transferred it to his enemy, and still got the same situation.
No, it's terrible.
It's a terrible idea.
But it does, funnily enough, it does feel to me like it is almost a kind of,
not throwing a tantrum, but a statement of how much he disliked what Moffat did with it.
And I don't know whether that's true. I don't know that he did dislike it, but it feels the
same with the way he's brought the master back, which is he doesn't acknowledge the storyline
of Missy in the vault and any of the character development that leads to her actions in
the doctor falls he he he basically kind of resets it and he resets it when the memory of that is
still is still fresh in our minds and that's that's what i'm that's what i'm objecting to
and i don't see the need particularly with the gallifrey stuff if he's like we don't want to
have stories about time lords with their big roughs and their silly politics that's fine i
don't want to have stories about time lords with their big roughs and silly politics either but
you can do that by not telling stories about Time Lords. The problem with destroying Gallifrey is
you've now got a whole other story about Gallifrey that we're going to tell. And I don't,
I honestly don't care about it. I didn't care about it. And he's going to undo it too.
Moffat was smart enough to use it very, very minimally. And now I suspect we're going to have
an entire season story arc about blinking Gallifrey. This bothers me because he is going
to undo everything we know about Gallifrey anyway with his timeless child lie nonsense
and that feels very Cartmel master plan to me yes it does and I did not like the Cartmel master plan
and I am glad that died on the vine I know I'm glad it died on the vine but I you know just if
you don't want to do right if you don't want to do Gallifrey don't do Gallifrey you don't need to
duke gallifrey they're hiding they're going to leave the doctor alone you can spend your time
in the universe we do not need that uh story we didn't need the naster now you mentioned the whole
undoing the bit with missy and the the development that they have i i was absolutely
angered let's use angered for the polite word at the end of part one because one we had a character
who was a decent character, seemed reasonable, was carrying on, you know, normal human conversations
and whatnot. And then once he's revealed to be the master, suddenly he was John Sim from
whenever John Sim appeared at the Sound of Drums or whichever one it was. He was the crazy spinning,
if he'd started dancing and around the thing, I would have, it was like, he's doing John Sim.
And I hated John Sims, Master in the RTD era.
And please, no, don't do that.
Because we know that this guy is capable of not being nutso.
Because he's been the whole time.
He's been functioning normally then.
So I was not happy at all.
And then when they came along in the second episode, I was fine with him.
I was fine with him.
I like him as the master.
He wasn't nuts.
It's still a little annoyed about the whole
da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da.
I wish they'd forgotten that,
but sound of drums.
Because it wasn't...
Yeah, anyway.
We won't go into sound of drums.
It didn't happen because...
I must say I agree with you
because if you were unable to avoid spoilers
about knowing that the master was going to be in this episode.
I didn't know.
I was completely and absolutely blindsided.
Somebody may have let the cat out of the bag
before I had a chance to watch this one.
So if you're watching the episode knowing that the master is in it,
it's fairly obvious when there is this character
who doesn't actually have anything to do with anything
suddenly interacting with everyone
that that's what's going to happen so I was watching his performance thinking
yes you know I quite like this much more low-key this sort of someone someone who is prepared to
be a backroom manipulator working all those years as an analyst in MI6 and the performances
there's definitely a kind of sinister thing going on when he's oh but it's not crazy um you know
sticking knitting needles up his nose type performance yeah and then exactly like you say
you get to that moment on the plane and i don't know but i there are there are moments in it that
are really good but it is again i think i can't help thinking it comes down to the direction
because it's like when he's at his best,
it's got to be when he's much closer to just,
I mean, obviously he's acting all the way through it,
but he's behaving naturally in some way.
It feels like Sasha DeWall doesn't,
his strength is not doing the John Simm crazy thing.
And I didn't particularly like the John Simm crazy thing.
That wasn't John Simm's strength either.
But it is like, that's not,
it's certainly not the kind of thing
i've seen him do before in space adventure in space and time or um line of duty or whatever
else i've seen him in um but it but it also just it doesn't it doesn't have a whereas his his
general performance is actually quite naturalistic and i agree with you by and large in the second
episode it's good that he gets to go to back go go you know back a bit he's still a bit shouty
i think a bit in in some of it and he doesn't he doesn't need to be um but certainly in the in the
scenes on the eiffel tower he is absolutely superb i think it would have been better uh much better
for for me who did not know and i apologize um and i didn't give it away i didn't give it away
i just sent you an email a text suggesting that we do an episode about the masters over the year
for the sidecars and patreon subscribers that just i could have been that it never occurred
to me to do the master because it was so far out of my mind that that would happen but anyway i
if he'd had the proper master beard even if it was still just sort of a stubbly beard i think
that would have when he popped i would i still wouldn't have cottoned on to it until that moment
Until he popped up and like, oh, the beard's been right there in front of my face the whole time.
You know, but and I did notice that his beard changed in illogical ways throughout the course of the episode.
Oh, it kept it got it kept getting thicker.
I mean, yes, at the end, it was thickest when he showed up again after having waited through half the 20th century.
But when he was in Nazi Germany, it was thicker than it was in 1834.
And when he was, oh, it was like, is that a continuity mistake?
Or are they trying to?
I'm sure it was a continuity mistake, given how slapdash the rest of this was.
But I agree.
With a show like this, when they do this timey-wimey stuff,
they kind of put you on notice that this kind of thing can happen.
So they damn well ought to make sure that they get everything right.
I, you know, I like Michelle Gomez's performance much better than John Sims.
And I like John Sim.
And when they brought John Sim back in the Doctor Falls, he was so much better.
He was superb.
He was the master.
He got to be the master.
And I'm looking forward to him in Big Finish and in the Masterful box set in like a year.
But I, you know, I like Michelle Gomez's performance better because she did a better crazy performance than John Sim did.
Yes, yes.
But I don't like crazy performance master.
I thought that Michelle Gomez played something that was well within her.
She is, when you see her interviewed, she is crazy.
I mean, she just is.
So her playing crazy is just like, she just lets it, she lets it out.
Whereas with him, you felt like he was trying to find it somewhere and he wasn't always succeeding.
Yeah. And so, you know, trying to divorce the performance, I just don't like the crazy master.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I like the master to be. I like the Roger Delgado master. And so I want to see
the master be an actual formidable villain that you don't think is a comic buffoon. I don't like
the joker and batman and i don't uh and i don't think the master is the joker and and shouldn't
be and so i kind of like the whacking phoenix joker but that's another conversation yeah so it
just but like i said i would be more than happy to see him back and i do appreciate the fact that
they did at least throw out a line because the second i saw him walk in in a nazi uniform as a
colonel or general or whatever he was i i'm not good with ranks and i saw him walk in i'm like
seriously people an indian dressed up as a nazi and the guys around him don't notice
that he does not look like mr blonde hair blue eyes come on so at least they did address they
did that but i don't i don't quite know what i feel about i mean i i was annoyed at the doctors
saying she was a pacifist because she's kind of not pacifist right and anyway i'm not sure that
being a pacifist when you're when what you're fighting against is the nazis nazis is necessarily
the most honorable position anyway but that you know i don't i don't don't annoy all the pacifists
out there i i i kind of get it i i don't want to disrespect it but the doctor then the doctor then
in a scene that almost directly follows on from that hands the master over as you say a man of
indian appearance even if he's gallifreyan indian to a bunch of nazis yeah which is kind of like
having him turned over to die yeah well he's turned turn is having him turned over to die and
also using using racialist thoughts as your instrument i mean that that that didn't yeah
that the other thing that i found quite interesting not interesting i don't know the other thing i
found it gave me pause because this sort of thing seemed to happen in the sound of drums um the the
the i'm sure the the master made the doctor kneel or you know tried to humiliate him in some way
and here he does it again yeah but this time he's doing it to a woman yeah is that worse it
it kind of yes it did it did i i i projected something completely different about a woman
kneeling in front of a man well it was just the first when he did it yeah there was that and i'm
like and there's both that and subservience and all around it's just like oh oh yeah and the funny
you know the funny thing is i've always thought and i guess maybe this is just me but you know
when i first heard of the doctor and the master it's like you know well that's because a doctor's
degree is higher than a master's degree yeah so that is not i i don't i take those as degrees
not as in uh professions i never have yes in my brain they're always i think as opposed to the
doctor fixes things and the master wants to crawl roll everything i take it as the master's just not
as good as the doctor yeah which which he isn't i mean that's always been the case
so call me by my name is like okay undergradsman
he think he thinks he's a criminal genius and actually he's just a bit rubbish
yeah so um all right well i i look forward to seeing him back though i look forward to seeing
him come back in his equivalent to the doctor falls you know a few years time when he's allowed
to be good and do it his way well oh i just need to i need to i need to ask you on the on the master
so i mean one thing there's obviously been speculation about is was he is he the master
after missy or is he a master from earlier because of the whole continuity question
and also his tardis as sunday reappeared which you know missy didn't have a tardis
john sim at some point after he escaped from gallifrey but obviously by the time he became
he didn't have it anymore anyway well then then they went back to gallifrey with a vortex
manipulator and stole one and then destroyed gallifrey i mean if they went to gallifrey
oh he might have gone yes he might have gone to gallifrey and um so so the master was
poddling along and came across o and tissue compression eliminated o and stole his identity
does that mean he stole his entire physical appearance it feels like that but i i didn't
i thought that the first time through but when i watched it the second time i'm not sure i'm not
sure because it's not clear to me that i i think we don't see the little mini o when the doctor
met o before she met this version of o yes in other words he was already the master yes and
o says when he met the doctor before she was a man but i don't know if that's true because that
would mean that one previous what the doctor effectively the doctor would have had to have
met o before the doctor falls for the doctor um which i'm starting to get confused about so maybe
o was lying about that because the doctor said the doctor it would have been quite strange if
the doctor thought that o was an mi6 analyst that he'd explained to o that sometimes he regenerated
and oh he might turn into a completely different person including he might change sex to so that
when the doctor turns up in the outback oh doesn't look on face doesn't blink now play playing so
because we although oh does have a file remember he has a whole shelf full of files on the doctor
which makes no sense at all considering it's the master yes which is which is the problem because
there's a whole load of there's a load of pretending to be one thing and then turning
out to be another which is fine but we never we never get a sufficient explanation of what is
what is the actual truth because we're being told things but we're never the master's long-term
plans where he pretends to be someone else don't make any sense they've never made any sense look
cast revolver uh uh you know any of those plans where the master takes on a disguise for centuries
or just waiting for the doctor to fall into his trap they just don't make any sense it's like and
This is another one.
If O was working on a trap to bring the doctor in, which he says he was, and he met the doctor before, surely he had a trap he could have sprung on the doctor the last time they met.
If they met.
If they met, yes.
And if the master, if the doctor originally met the real O, the master must have taken over the full appearance of O.
That feels like that has to be the case.
In which case...
He did say something about keeping him as a backup.
The master must have been someone else
before they were Sasha DeWall, in other words.
But presumably after they were Michelle Gomez,
if Sasha DeWall is indeed the one after Michelle Gomez.
My brain hurts.
Will we ever know?
Yeah.
I don't think the writer cares enough
to bother to make an excuse.
So I think...
No, I don't think so.
There'll be a release from Big Finish in about 2053 that explains it all.
I was going to say, well, you know, if they work on it now,
maybe they can fit him in in the 2021 release of Masterful.
But I don't know.
Question about caring.
The references to the timeless child.
Do we care?
Why, no, we don't.
Why should we?
Okay.
I find it a mystery that's not interesting.
It doesn't.
No, because...
But, okay.
It means nothing to us because we don't know what the Gallifreyan myth about the timeless child is or why everything is built on that story.
Why it's a lie and why does it matter?
Yeah.
Okay.
So if, let's say, your parents came to you and said, by the way, everything you know about your family history and the history of it's all a lie, none of it's true.
It's completely just made up.
adopted you, you were found under a rock somewhere, you know, whatever it happens to be, right?
Doesn't change you. It doesn't change anything about you. So if somebody lied about the founding
of your country or a founding of your planet or the nature, it doesn't matter. It just doesn't
matter. It's hard to envision something that would be so devastating that you would go,
oh you rotten liars
I'm going to kill you all
and blow up your planet
even if I am a crazy guy
I just
I don't care
I literally don't care about the history of Gallifrey
or anything about it
a little bit you know tidbit here and there
but I just don't care
and if you're going to make that your true mystery
and
you know and it'll come back
when the Vore come back at the end of the series
just like Toothface did from the last one, Tim Shaw, inexplicably.
It'll come back.
Yeah, it'll come back.
Yeah.
But I mean, to me, it's like, it's not Gallifrey per se.
I've listened to the audio series set on Gallifrey.
I find all of the kind of political shenanigans quite entertaining
if you're listening to stories about political shenanigans.
But this is just, there is no story being told.
There is no story being told because we don't know anything about the Timeless Child.
So why should we care?
Yeah, it's not the Time Lord Galvin.
He said something of his oil a lie about Rassilon.
At least we'd have like, well, I know some stuff about Rassilon or Omega.
I don't particularly care about Rassilon.
What I need is I need to know a lot more about the Timeless Child or Rassilon or whoever before some reveal about them actually makes me go.
You know something about Rassilon.
Oh, my God.
But if it's just like there was, it's like someone telling you a story and it's some
shocking story about someone you've never heard of and know nothing about.
And you're supposed to be shocked about it.
Whereas if someone tells you a shocking story about, I don't know, your next door neighbor
who you lived next door to for 20 years and you didn't know this.
The axe murderer.
Wow.
But you've got 20 years of buildup for that to have an impact.
Right.
In the timeless child is nothing.
so yeah it's it's just gonna mess up it's just gonna mess up continuity
i just i just have a bad feeling about that the war doctor was was that something that messed up
continuity but it was something that connected with something that had been built up over this
sort of eight years or so so that the show had been back and you know it was it was quite cleverly
done yeah but this this well we'll see we'll see it's hard to tell at this stage all we all we're
getting is the kind of foreshadowing of something happens i'm not sure we're supposed to care about
it at this point but we'll see it's it's it's bad wolf it's bad wolf all over again it feels like
all right do you have anything else on this episode i'm sure there's other stuff that that
well you know there's not we're not gonna go there project yes he called it judderal bank
she called it jodril bank but they never called it jodril bank they called it the faros project
in lagoplas i guess it was the faros project at jodril bank now apparently the tce is back
the tissue compression eliminator yay yeah i i like that much better than a laser screwdriver
and uh no well i'm i've got big hopes that the next one is going to be better at least it's um
It's written by the guy who wrote one of the absolute Stone Cold classics from the last season.
I keep forgetting the name, but I just think of it as the Frog on the Chair episode.
Oh, dear.
And that does not bode well to me.
They Take You Away, I think it was called.
Yes, I think that's it.
They Take You Away.
Yes, this is going to be good.
The only thing is it's directed by the person who directed Spyfall Part 2, which...
It's not necessarily...
I'm just hoping will be an opportunity for redemption.
I gotta say, you know, they put so little in the trailer that it's not enough to even wet my interest.
I don't mind. I don't need it. I'm going to watch Doctor Who anyway. I don't need a trailer.
I am going to watch Doctor Who anyway, but then why bother with the trailer?
If you're not trying to wet the interest, why bother?
I don't know. I wouldn't bother. I wish they didn't do them. All they ever do is include spoilers.
Just let me come to it fresh, please.
I know in the part two trailer, the trailer for part two of Spyfall, they didn't even show the doctor or any of the fam.
Because they were dead, obviously.
I mean, they didn't want to spoil the fact that they escaped from the plane.
Yeah.
But yeah.
I definitely thought they were dead.
Yeah.
I was hoping actually at one point there.
Got it at one point.
I was.
All right.
Well, Simon, thank you for joining me.
It's a pleasure as always.
Uh, listeners, hope you'll join us all again next time.
And I will remind you that for, for those of you who are, uh, Patreon patrons, uh, or
those who want to become sponsors, we are putting out a series of podcasts, short podcasts,
just because this was not long enough, um, on various Doctor Who topics.
And I think this week, almost certainly, I think it's going to be about the master through
the ages.
So, uh, please join us again next time on Fusion Patrol.
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