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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.
Two episodes to synopsize here.
I just made that word up.
Following the coordinates obtained from Percy Shelley,
the Doctor and the gang arrive on a planet in the far future
where there are seven remaining humans.
She has them set up defenses against the Cybermen that fail.
The Cybermen are led by the lone Cybermen,
who is a nutcase who wanted to be a Cybermen but got rejected as inferior.
Isn't that how Hitler got his start?
The team is split, with Graham, Yaz, and some humans escaping in a rickety old spaceship,
while the Doctor, Ryan, and some humans steal a cybership.
They all make their way to a planet which is home to the legendary Boundary,
a mysterious gateway for escape to some random part of the universe.
Along the way, Graham's team capture a cybercarrier complete with a lot of dormant Cybermen.
The Doctor in the faster cybership gets there first and inspects the Boundary,
which shows Gallifrey behind it and belches forth the Master.
Oh, and there was some stuff with a guy who was a policeman, but he died, but he actually didn't
somewhere. End of part one. Part two. The Master forces the Doctor to go to Gallifrey. He imprisons
her in the Matrix while at the same time inviting the Cybermen to come through and visit. Incidentally,
Graham's team escaped from the Cybermen. The Master shows the Doctor a story about the origin
of the Time Lords. One of their early explorers discovered an immortal child and adopted it,
returning to Gallifrey.
The Child was immortal because it could regenerate.
The power of regeneration was copied from the Child,
and the Time Lords were created,
limited as they were to only 12 regenerations,
unlike the Child.
The Child was the Doctor,
who apparently is erased,
forced back to childhood,
and starts all over again once in a while.
The purpose?
To save the universe while allowing Gallifrey
to maintain a policy of non-intervention?
The Master is mad because the Doctor really is special, and he owes his existence to her.
So, being nuts, he's saved all the Time Lord bodies, and he's converting them to a new race of immortal Cyber Time Lords.
Oh, and somewhere along the line, he dispensed with the lone Cybermen with no difficulty whatsoever.
Most of the Matrix has been redacted, so the Doctor's story is still a mystery.
we'll probably have to suffer with as long as Chibnall is calling all the shots
before it's forgotten like a bad shower sequence in Dallas.
The Doctor escapes by blowing up the Matrix.
That would be the Matrix that contains all the memories of all Time Lords,
past and present, throughout all time.
The Doctor blows that Matrix up by, and I'm not making this up,
remembering everything she's done in an ordinary Time Lord lifespan.
Anyway, having killed the Lone Cyberman,
the Master took the Siberian into himself
and confronted with the possibility of an immortal cyber race
with the ability to regenerate,
the Doctor has the humans blow up the Cybership,
killing all the Cybermen.
The Doctor sends her friends home in a TARDIS
and then goes to detonate a bomb
which contains the Death Particle,
a spurious non-sequitur devised by the Siberian
to destroy all organic life in the universe.
Detonating this bomb will destroy the Master,
the Cyber Time Lords,
the spare bodies in the refrigerator
and all organic material on Gallifrey.
Of course, she can't do it,
So one of the human characters who turns out at the last possible moment to be one of the idiots who thought sending the Siberian back in time was a good idea blows up the bomb instead and the doctor escapes in another TARDIS.
Retrieving her own TARDIS and then being captured and imprisoned forever by the Jadun in a prison that wouldn't keep River Song secure on a Friday night.
The end.
Oh, and no spoilers here, but both the cliffhanger and our Christmas New Year season has been ruined already by the title of the next episode.
Now, I'm going to preface this right off the bat for this discussion.
I did a Fusion Reaction Live episode Sunday morning before the Doctor Who episode aired,
and I said something that turned out to be a lie.
I said that I was going to go watch Ascension of the Cybermen again before I watched The Timeless Children.
And as it happens, I couldn't watch it again. So I watched The Timeless Children. And then after that, I just could not be bothered to watch both of them because, oh, my God, it's so long.
And so I am on this totally cold, having watched them once without taking notes during the course of the episodes.
And I made a conscious effort not to write notes down because I didn't want to be the guy, although I am that guy,
I didn't want to be the guy that just spent hours documenting stupid, stupid things in a tediously boring episode.
Now, I may have already come down on where I stand on this.
I understand there are people who like it.
Perhaps you liked it.
I'll put it out there.
I still wrote down some things, but because I woke up in the middle of the night needing to write down some things that were causing me not to sleep well.
So how did you like this episode, Simon?
Both of the episodes as a total thing.
As a total thing?
The problem for me is that The Timeless Children is so deeply flawed
that any enjoyment I had of The Ascension of the Cybermen
isn't going to outweigh it when you take them as a unit.
And I've got to say, I enjoyed The Ascension of the Cybermen
as I often do, the build-up episodes entertain me
because they are, in some sense, they are quite low stakes.
It's build-up, build-up, build-up.
You don't have to have a resolution that's inevitably disappointing,
even though actually having the master appear,
I somehow found disappointing.
A lot of the stuff in that episode was nice world-building
and there were, you know, the fun kind of little fan service things
like the super duper new old retro Cybermen
and all of that kind of post-Cyberwar stuff
was quite entertaining.
But then the Timeless Children didn't really do it for me.
Okay, well, I guess we're roughly perhaps on the same page.
Now, I will say I also enjoyed the ascension of the Cybermen,
having watched it once.
I had two moments that bugged the heck out of me.
One was the cyber drones, which is just a dumb idea.
And it is.
But on the other hand, you can understand it and it doesn't spoil the episode.
It's just like that.
Here's the marketing department saying, hey, guys, we need to sell some of these.
Can you stick them in somewhere?
OK, moment's over.
I suppose it does kind of come back to a question that's raised in the Timeless Children about what happens to the Cybermen when we go without organic.
Are those cyber heads, heads in there, sans body now?
Or are they just made in the shape?
I'm concerned.
So one of the many problems of the Timeless Children, and there's no way we're going to have time to go into all of them.
But the whole death particle thing is the only reason that even talking about having organic, sorry, completely non-organic Cybermen, which as the master correctly points it, it's like they've got, Chibnall's looked at the scene he's just written and gone, you know, he's pulled this death particle out because he's got to have some way of resolving the story.
and that's what he's come up with.
And obviously it's going to kill all the Cybermen.
So, oh, that's no good.
So, oh, what the hell?
I'll just make them into robots.
But being robots is just a bit boring.
Anyone could turn themselves into a robot.
Never mind.
We'll just have the master say it
and then that makes it okay.
Are you ever going to watch this episode again?
I have a thought experiment.
I probably am, but I've got to say, like you,
I was planning to watch the two episodes back to back so I could watch the whole thing as a thing.
And partly time defeated me, but partly I'll be honest.
I mean, I did this for Spyfall and I found that a bit of a slog.
And I think I only managed it with the kind of start of the series enthusiasm that I had, which has slowly been beaten out of me.
I mean, there were episodes in this season that I liked, but yeah, I'd somehow had that energy zapped from me that the thought of watching this whole thing again just was too much.
I watched the Doctor defeating the Matrix sequence several times, including in slow motion.
I tried to frame through it.
Yep, yep, I tried that.
But apart from that, the rest of it, no.
So here's what I'm going to suggest to you or to any listener out there who watches this again.
Imagine every line by the master spoken by Chris Chibnall.
In fact, I want to see somebody doing a deep fake and put Chris Chibnall in that spot.
Because I feel like this script is a metaphor for what he is doing to Doctor Who.
And picture his scenes where he's talking about, I've shown you this stuff and now I've broken you.
I've beaten you.
And the doctor says, and pardon my sense, so f***ing what?
You didn't beat me?
What?
Huh?
Doesn't change who I am.
And he's like, but it did.
It did.
I'm going to beat you.
I'm going to destroy you.
I am going to do it.
No.
Okay.
Well.
That's how I feel about it.
I think there's an...
I really, really don't want to impugn
Chibnall's motivation.
I mean, I think he's a fine writer.
He just has written
a not very good episode,
not for the first time.
And I definitely think
he loves the show
and has loved it for a long time.
But there are...
I think the master loves the doctor too
in a mad sort of insane way.
Well, yeah.
Well, yes, yes, yes.
Okay.
Yes, love is a strange thing.
And it's certainly the case that characters in this episode
try and explain what our relationship should be
with the changes that are being made,
as in, you know, rewriting the Doctor's history.
But, you know, the Joe Martin Doctor was popping up
to say what Chibnall wants to say to us
about how, you know, it doesn't actually change the character,
yada, yada, yada.
I think in a way you're right about, it would be interesting to have the master just,
the fact of the matter is the way that, and it's probably the biggest problem with The Timeless
Children, because there's nothing in it that I particularly hate. It is purely that it's a really,
really badly structured episode in terms of giving you any kind of dramatic tension or a
reason to care about anything that's going on and the biggest reason for that is because it is mostly
just the master explaining stuff twice yeah exactly and and this this this in two different
places at once yeah so that so this is why he is a he is a he's a proxy he's a proxy right and that
two different things at once it is like you need the master to do all of the exposition but the
master is already engaged somewhere else in the plot including at one point being possessed by
the siberian which you think is probably something that is going to take over your entire consciousness
at least temporarily but doesn't no he's still half in the matrix and the half that's in the
matrix isn't even batting a virtual eyelid so yes i was like it it just i i feel him talking and i'm
and i wasn't actually in trying to put um malicious intent there the master yes but this is this is
that sort of if you you know you give a knife to a surgeon and you give your knife and you give a
knife to a plumber uh you know who do you want cutting open another human being and it's the
surgeon not the plumber and i think this is the case of the plumber's been handed a knife
and and then he's trying to justify it and and like i said it just it felt like a mess i mean
for crying out loud the big empty meta the big empty matrix right when he hits the point where
it's all erased he's like it's it's an on your head metaphor for here is now the mystery i have
created for doctor who so that it can be filled in again i have created a new empty canvas to work
upon like it just it's his okay okay his his his i'm quite interested in what what he what he thought
he was doing and i and you you may you may have the explanation there because i think there is a
a parallel this is the chibnall master plan the i know i know and and the interesting thing is how
much praise and joy that this episode and this series is filling uh some fans with who's you
know including a number of commentators whose opinion i respect but it's interesting that it
isn't doing it for me and i think that's partly just doctor who it's like i i like the andrew
cartmel era you don't like the andrew cartmel era that's you know that's doctor who fans you
pick anything there'll be someone who likes it and so and so you know with the cartmel master plan
i really i really admired the the what the direction that cartmel took the show in and i
also admired the fact that in in doing that he had a a coherent plan for where he was going with it
even if I didn't admire the coherent plan itself because it was silly. And in a way,
I would like to admire Chibnall for coming at this with a coherent plan. And obviously,
we haven't got all of the answers in this. There is some more to go here. But I was sitting there
thinking, I really don't understand what exactly it is that he's trying to say with any of this.
I liked some of the ideas he had.
I really thought some of them were extremely pointless, to be kind.
And I couldn't quite figure it out because does it really create a mystery?
Do you think it may?
I mean, I like...
Well, only if the doctor then pursues it.
Well, now I have to find out where I came from.
See?
Well, maybe.
Yeah.
But the problem that Cartmel was dealing with was that all of this kind of stuff with all the Time Lords and the Time Lords turning out to be these kind of arrogant, pompous, venal politicking, and just generally kind of bureaucratic and up themselves and awful.
It's a fair criticism. I think a lot of the Gallifrey stuff is is pretty kind of.
Yeah. So so you think when when when the days when it was just when it was just the doctor in a police box wandering around the universe, having these adventures.
Great. Without this whole kind of backstory. Maybe we could do that again.
And so we've had various situations where they've tried to address these things.
you know the cartonel master plan might have been one of them there's obviously the whole kind of
um you know addressing it by destroying gallifrey well russell t davis did this when he just said
there was a time war and the time lords were wiped out he actually was on to something with that
because then you could what he realized was that the way to deal with the time lords and
and all that kind of baggage was not to talk about it stick a line in here or there to and
the trap he fell into of course was by the by the time he left the show and did the end of time was
he was that was where he was going with it and it's like chibnall doesn't seem to doesn't seem
to figure that the the if what he's after is to is to shed this baggage what he should do is exactly
what he did with the last season which is have a bunch of stories that are about the doctor and her
new chums and aren't connected with all of the kind of 50x years of bump whereas this season he
just seems to have got mired in all of this and and and for everything that he's fixed he's created
a new problem so you say you don't feel he has a coherent plan and i will i will go so far as to
say that that is one of the things that stood out to me. I think he has a coherent plan. I don't
think he has a coherent plan. No, he does not have a coherent plan. And I can demonstrate why he
doesn't have a coherent plan. What I'm saying is I think he's got a goal. I think he's got a goal.
I just, I can't quite figure out what it is. Coherent plan. And I'm not sure he had exactly
a goal. And I will tell you why. Let's start with, well, maybe I can forgive Spyfall for the
whole ah i know a secret but i'm gonna not tell you for another 10 episodes or eight episodes
because that's just clickbait but if if i understand this correctly what we saw on the
screen the doctor is this child that was picked up by a shabogan um and can apparently regenerate
an unknown number of times perhaps infinitely yes the time lord stole genetic material and
made themselves capable of regenerating and made themselves into the Time Lords. And then
the Division decided to send the Timeless Child out into the universe to do good works while
Gallifrey does not. Okay? So far, so with me, am I on plan with that? And then at some point,
they take the doctor back in wipe the doctor's memory regress the doctor to a child in this case
they regress the doctor to a child young william hartnell uh young william hartnell grows up with
the master and the ronnie and barusa galfrey and then goes off and then one day decides to steal
a TARDIS with his granddaughter, who he has procreated with, or not procreated with.
Whoa!
Yeah, yeah, my bad there.
That was the wrong choice of the word.
He has procreated children who have then produced a grandchild, and he has stolen a defective
TARDIS.
He's traveled around the universe for a while.
he lands up in totters lane where the chameleon circuit gets stuck like a police box and then
goes on his adventures becoming the hero that we know now where that problem fails is that if dr
joe is a pre-hartnell doctor which why is her tardis a police box yeah no she has to be she
can't be a pre a pre-hartnell but she has to be based on the way this is laid out that that has
i'm still not sure about that because because obviously i think that the joe martin thing
hasn't been resolved in this episode and didn't didn't make any sense would have been just as
good as if they had uh you know paul mcgann substituting there in the in the matrix um
yeah it it if they're specifically stating that they are regressing her to a child she
was regressed to a child. She grew up with a master. The master confirms that. She confirms
that. Yes. That part of her life, and the master must know that because his life is, you know,
commensurate as opposed to being an infinite time. The Joe doctor has to be one of the prior
regression doctors. Has to be. It's just that they didn't think about that when they put the
TARDIS together because they didn't have a coherent plan. They just threw that out there and said,
Okay, first off, let's have a doctor we don't know anything about.
That'll add some mystery to it.
And then we'll explain.
Don't worry, I'll figure it out later.
They should have done anything but make that TARDIS look like a police box.
If anybody else had shown up with a TARDIS and she said, I'm the doctor.
No, you're not the doctor.
Whoa, you are the doctor.
Then that would have been a proper mystery.
But this says that nobody was planning this out.
They were just pulling it out of their Siberian death particle cavity and going.
Except we don't know where the Joe Martin Doctor fits.
Neither did they.
And it seems likely that the Joe Martin Doctor is going to appear in the next episode
because the next episode is obviously a sequel to Fugitive of the Jadoon.
Do you think?
I mean, I may be wrong, but I'm certain the Joe Martin Doctor is going to come back
and there is going to be some sort of an explanation of that part of it.
Also, if Gallifrey is dead and gone and dead and gone again and again and again,
and this was to get rid of the Time Lords,
but we know that the Doctor can bump into the Joe Martin Doctor
and the Joe Martin Doctor is running around with Gallifreyans,
then the Gallifreyans will never, ever be truly gone.
It doesn't matter whether you organically wipe them out or not.
That which was quite weird in itself.
And it seemed to me at the time in need of an explanation.
I don't know whether we are going to get that explanation or not, because one of the things that always seems to get ignored is the way in which time travel could resolve some things.
And then it's just ignored if it would be inconvenient because you have to resolve them.
I mean, this is the thing I don't really understand.
Is Chibnall, does he feel he needs to fix all of this backstory to Doctor Who?
Because somehow it's bugging.
It seems to me that if you watch this without knowing all of the kind of,
say you started watching this at the beginning of the Jodie Whittaker Doctor,
then all of this means nothing to you.
Does anyone watching it care?
Yeah.
And the answer is no.
I mean, obviously Chibnall is a proper nerdy fan.
He's been a fan for years and years.
Maybe he deeply cares about some of these kind of historical inconsistencies.
But for the structural reasons we've talked about in the episode,
what he hasn't actually managed to do is turn them into something
that I can imagine the casual audience really engaging with,
because there's no obvious reason why it should matter to the Doctor
what what happened to her before she could remember being William Hartnell essentially
someone very astutely pointed out that the doctor is one of the most in the moment characters on TV
so this whole idea of caring about your history is a bit of a nonsense it certainly doesn't seem
clear why the master cares about it so much so we're getting told a lot of stuff and and yet
not even getting any clues as to why it affects the characters that we're trying to care about
as much as we're told it does. And yet we're also told that it doesn't. I mean,
the master is back practically begging the doctor to be broken when he tells her this news.
I mean, he's, he's, he's like, ah, I've done it. I've broken you. No, I've broken you. No,
but, but I've broken you. No. And then the doctor is feeling a little, maybe a little broken. And
So what? Oh, yeah. Good point. All right. Fine. Whatever.
Yeah, but that's because we don't care about it in the first place.
There's a, I mean, there are a number of good comments made by Andrew Ellard about this one.
But the one in particular that I thought relevant to this was because the actual,
the history of regeneration bit is one of the elements of this that I found quite, you know,
there was something neat about it. I quite liked the ideas in it.
But it's still structurally problematic in terms of the episode, because what he was suggesting was if you had had some other third party who, you know, the Time Lords who are often a bit of a naughty bunch of people had been experimenting on their DNA or something.
and the doctor met them and and they feared her because she's a time lord and the time you know
the time lords had been experimenting on their dna or whatever and then they had you know had
this reveal about the fact that well the time lords have been experimenting on her dna and
that there's something dramatic to a story like that whereas just having a couple of time lords
talking to each other about the distant history of regeneration is as he puts it basically just
gossip and it's hard to care about it because it could all be fake ancient calendar well that's
you see that's the other thing that's the other thing that i was watching this episode and i was
absolutely 100 certain as the master was saying don't you get it yet your doctor you're the
timeless child that the master was the timeless child because everything the doctor knows about
the timeless child she is being shown by stuff that the master has discovered including all of
the division stuff because all of that you know brendan and the guarder is beamed into her mind
by the master so it's all coming from the master so i thought we were going to get a twist at the
end where it's actually oh no the timeless child isn't the doctor it's the master which to me would
kind of make some sort of sense because the history of abuse would have given some kind of
meaning to why the master is quite so unhinged it would also uh why he's why he destroyed
gallifrey yeah exactly yeah exactly you lied to me about the doctor i'm gonna kill you
there would have been there would have been a kind of yeah there would have been a dramatic
um resolution at least to the way that every yeah everything you know is not the case
It's not.
Well, I'm still not certain it's the case, but...
Well, as the Master said, everything you know is a lie.
Well, it's not actually, because the history of the Time Lords is still relatively the same, except for we don't even know how they first got the power to regenerate.
So the fact that you omitted a detail that a person had it and you transferred it to the others doesn't really change the history of the Time Lords.
And a secret organization known as The Division, which is run by someone who wears the Valyards clothes.
Did you notice that?
I didn't notice that.
In that scene where she's talking to the boy saying, you understand all this?
It's wearing the Valyards outfit.
Okay, that could be a pointer to something coming down the line.
But I agree with you.
The whole general way this thing was sold, that it was a big deal, is not a big deal.
it all actually seems somewhat inconsequential.
It's just trying to shoehorn in an extra,
that empty cloud of the matrix
so they can write in more history
or give the doctors something to worry about.
It's like, I used to think I was from Gallifrey,
but now I don't know.
So I guess I am not going to spend the rest of my life
doing what I've been doing for the last 2000 years.
I've got to go wonder about this now.
Well, yeah, except I hope she doesn't.
I'm quite happy with the idea that suddenly the Doctor discovers that she's an orphan and not actually from Gallifrey in the first place.
And why timeless children?
You set that up as a, this is just, well, I'm still wondering about it.
I think the intention might be that everyone's going on about how Chibnall has now canonised all these kind of additional Doctors.
And it's the idea that there are now all these additional incarnations.
I don't like that because I think the Doctor is the Doctor.
In a way, the only thing I've got to celebrate here is that we can stop flipping wrong,
saying it's the 13th Doctor or whatever, which is wrong.
You still can't.
But it's not wrong because that's what people will do.
She is the first Doctor.
She's the only Doctor.
But yeah.
Well, yes, I know people will still do that.
Except that you can't differentiate them.
in their own timeline so but that's but that but you don't need to differentiate them in their own
time that that is the whole point it is it is the same character which is caller 13 prime so
you know matt smith is 11 prime and and joe martin will be and i'm thinking joe martin is probably
13 uh subprime one i think she's probably the last one before the transfer to hartnell that's
Yes.
Well, because she's being chased by Gallifrey, she wants to avoid it.
So Gallifrey captures her, takes her back, wipes her memory, puts her into the heart and will run.
That seems like the logical progression for that character.
But anyway.
Could be.
I mean, honestly.
And I will agree with you.
The master makes much more sense.
But you know what also makes more sense?
If it's both the master and the doctor.
What, you mean that they're the same character?
No.
that they're both timeless children they were both the time there was anyone child
according to the master oh okay yeah all right i'm with that according to an unreliable crazy
narrator at one point i did i did wonder if he was going to go for the master is a previously
now forgotten set of regenerations of the doctor um here's another one that's would have been
interesting another one's gonna just irritate the hell out of people it irritates me you know
the guy at the end who i didn't even bother to memorize his name that blew himself up
maybe he was the doctor too in fact maybe everyone we ever meet is actually the doctor
well maybe the doctor is everyone we filled up the universe with chameleon arch doctors
they're all over the place it's it's like it actually kind of felt like that when he ran in
run doctor as if he knew uh it just yeah it's like oh man you've just
no no captain jack yeah i i yeah no apparent reason for captain jack to be involved in that
warning i'm sure we're getting more more captain jack at some point i think i think captain jack
should have been involved in the kind of resistance story i mean here here's another
problem with this two-parter it's not a two-parter it is it's actually two two separate stories
basically you've got the this this whole thing about the lone cyber men so the lone cyber man
i should say who wasn't ever really that alone because he seemed to have some other cyber
henchmen but whatever and you've got you've got that nice that nice kind of i'm assuming it's sort
of 26th 27th century post cyber war you know human race is on its absolute uppers and there are the
there are these kind of resistance groups and they've done this clever thing of sending the
siberian back through time and jack is somehow involved with that and all that's quite intriguing
and everything and like i say i was quite enjoying that story then you've got this separate thing
about the the doctor's early history and the connected with the destruction of gallifrex
it's something's a bad idea but all right whatever all that being explained and the problem is the
cybermen story crashes into that story but the cybermen don't have anything to do as you say
you know the the lone cybermen gets pointlessly defeated by the master in an instant and
the the role of the cybermen which demonstrates the cybermen are not a threat yeah the role of
the cybermen is instantly reduced to just basically the master's henchmen again which
you know has happened we seem to have had quite a lot of master and cybermen stories over the past
few years i just want to throw in here so too are the cyber time lords because if that tissue
compression eliminator would work on them i don't think regeneration will fix that problem
so i don't understand i don't understand why the tissue compression eliminator worked
on the non-organic parts that aren't tissue but it always worked on clothes too so well they could
be organic they could have been organic but what we should have seen is people disappearing inside
their acrylic jumpers or whatever because it wouldn't work on anything made of artificial
fiber our cybermen i mean we have the plot where he talks about turning the cybermen into robots
which as you rightly point out uh doesn't make any sense but really is the fact that the the
human bits inside humanoid bits inside the armor able to rebuild itself is that really how you
destroy a cyberman it's like oh you know it doesn't matter what we do to their armor or their
head or anything like that as long as that those bits inside can regenerate they'll they'll
regenerate into cybermen and so they'll be invulnerable except if they regenerate and
there's only bits of gallifreyan's left wouldn't they regenerate into a whole gallifreyan
just set all that aside and i still think you've got i still think you've got a fundamental problem
with these cyber time lords, which is that essentially the reason robotic cybermen aren't
interesting is because the thing that makes cybermen special and scary and all the rest of it
is that they are augmented humans who have added all of these cyber bits to themselves,
but they are still they are still organic in you know in in brain they're just they've they've
taken out the they've they've worked they've worked on their brains to take out all of the
emotional parts and everything and they have made themselves into machine-like things a machine is
already a machine-like thing there's nothing interesting about that one of the reasons why
an organic life form might do this to themselves i would have thought is yeah partly there is this
thing about conquest and all of that but really that's that's the daleks bag in doctor who the
the kind of the more interesting thing about it if you think about why why these people did this
in the first place is because it allows them, not their race, but them as individuals to survive
where they weren't able to before. And in a way, what it's giving them is immortality,
because they are able to replace the parts that wither and die of an organic being with
artificial replacements. And if those artificial replacements get damaged or whatever,
they can replace those and presumably there are organic elements that are that are still in there
they're essentially so protected and armored or whatever they are invulnerable so what the cyber
men represent in effect is some form of immortality already and therefore giving them the immortality
that regeneration is supposed to confer on them is completely meaningless i mean regeneration is
another form of immortality it's interesting because it changes all sorts of things you know
your whole um physiology is is changed and your personality is changed but that doesn't apply
if you're regenerating inside a cyber suit yeah it doesn't make any sense at all so it's i mean
not only does it not make sense but it doesn't have any it doesn't have any real additional
threat it's like suddenly these these cyber armies are supposed to be this threat that's worse than
the existing cyber armies but they're not they've just got the stupid collars i guess they do have
the stupid collars uh well the other thing that that i mean what i what we are shown is that you
take a cyberman you shoot him and he's dead you take a cyber uh time lord you shoot him he's dead
and then he gets back up again so weebles wobble but they don't fall down he's that's supposedly
the advantage being conveyed by the time lords but if these are time lords if these are time
lord bodies let's start with they all only have 12 regenerations and what happens if you blow
them up with a bomb so they're not that much more resilient they're not and and it's not that much
bigger and advantage if you're if you if your cyberman gets if your cyberman is down and
damaged or whatever then i guess you take that cyberman back to the cyber factory and you know
either either the the organ there's enough organic elements surviving in there for you to be able to
do a repair job or i guess you can use it for spare parts and you've got a new cyberman so
from the point of view of having an army the main advantage of your regeneration is it's
quick repairing and we've already had quick repairing in these kind of nano cyber nano
nonsense or whatever so even that's not really new yep no it did it i can't i can't see i can't
see why the cybermen are in this story i honestly can't i like i liked the cyberman story we're
having it was fine but if they'd wrapped it up in ascension of the cybermen then they could have cut
a good 25 minutes out of the timeless children and just had it about the the gallifrey shaboggan
um yeah time lord origin story of course um regeneration lord as they would have been called
back then presumably yeah uh yeah and and you know it's funny that that i know i've made this
comment before dalek plans are stupid right they don't make any sense they're just insanely
over complicated to ridiculous ends so is every plan in this story the time lord's plan of creating
the the doctor by wiping a person and sending them out there to do the secret good works
is a stupid plan the the lone cyberman's plan is a stupid plan i'm going to turn them all into
robots and then i'm going to destroy all organic life in the universe is a stupid plan the master's
plan is a stupid plan uh chibnall's is a stupid plan it just there this is a litany of dumb plans
hang on a minute hang on let me let me just so let's go back to the master's plan i don't know
what the master's plan is about he's gonna show the doctor the truth and she's gonna crumble
that's his plan i don't know what the master wants that's one of his two plans i mean we
we i was almost i'll be honest when when when the master turned up in at the end of the
ascension of the cybermen before any of this episode happened i was not filled with eager
anticipation shall we say there were moments in spyfall where i thought this could be this could
be quite an interesting incarnation of the master it didn't feel like this is an interesting
incarnation back in spyfall there was some kind of plan of some sort in this i had no idea what
the master's plan was he was just back to being completely deranged deranged yeah which is not
you know there's there's potential for that to be interesting it doesn't seem to me that is the most
interesting aspect of the master and if you don't understand why it is the case the master keeps
saying that you made me you made me what i am but i don't even understand i i felt like that could
be spelled out because obviously over the history of doctor who we've had various explanations of
how the master came to be how he is and that you know the doctor's early friendship with the master
and Chibnall is obviously paying some attention to the what they call the extended universe i.e.
the other Doctor Who stories in books and audios and things like this but given that it's helpful
when you're telling a story like this to kind of reiterate exactly what you mean it wouldn't have
hurt in my opinion to explain exactly what the master feels the doctor has turned himself into
and how i just didn't understand that so if you're playing the range master you need to know
yeah i thought some of it had to do with the fact that he wouldn't be the time lords wouldn't be
what they are without the doctor's regeneration so it's just because he's a time lord but then
that is not like most time lords are as barking as the master although to be honest most of the
ones in the tv show are but anyway that's because we don't get to see the time lords that sort of
work in offices and clean people's phones and things but hey ho yeah the master's plan i don't
get the the lone cyber man's plan okay the non-organic parts that was stupid i really
really really liked the whole lone cyber man reject um you know trying to try trying to
it's like uh making making the cyber race great again is he's that kind of that in that kind of
inadequate who is who has kind of been hijacked by some right-wing ideology that he is pursuing
relentlessly and the fact that he was so emotional despite the fact that the kind of cyber ideal is
this emotionless efficiency worked really well for me and I was looking with anticipation to
see where that was actually going to lead and how those aspects of his personality would either
help him in his quest to resurrect the Cybermen or would ultimately lead to the kind of renewed
Cyber Army's downfall. But of course, we didn't get any of that because at some point in the story,
Chibnall just decided, oh, right, we're done with him and tissue compassion eliminated him.
Yeah, it was kind of interesting. The notion that a fanatic would be the one that revived the Cyberman. It's not the first time we have seen a fanatic who wants to lead an army of whatever.
No, but it's an interesting take.
It's more interesting than that he's this emotional Cyberman.
And of course, he's going to wipe out all of their robotic parts or he's going to wipe out all their organic parts by first making them all into robots.
So they're not even Cybermen anymore.
And then after he's done all that and after he's wiped out all life in the universe, then he's going to, you know, carry on to his great reward or whatever it is.
And did you notice at one point the Siberian will destroy all organic life in the universe?
but later in the episode,
the Siberian will destroy all organic life on this planet.
Yeah, you mean the death particle?
Yeah, the death particle, I'm sorry.
Yeah, the Siberian's death particle.
It's seriously downgraded from earlier in the show
to when they needed it to just wipe out Gallifrey.
Yeah.
But the death particle thing is another rubbish.
I'm not defending every aspect of the Lone Cyberman's plan.
I just liked something about the Lone Cyberman story.
And therefore, it was another disappointment that it sort of petered out.
Okay.
I do want to say I've forgotten my list of litany of plans that are stupid in this episode.
The human's plan to take the Siberium and send it back in time to get rid of it is a stupid plan.
Yeah, you mentioned that that was stupid.
And I was expecting that to be explained.
And they didn't really explain it other than saying they didn't send it far enough back.
We sent it far enough back.
And we sent it to Earth.
I mean, what a great place to send something that does cyber conversion stuff is the place where humans are handy.
I wanted to understand what the Siberian's plan was and how it differed from what the lone Cyberman's plan was, because it seemed to me that in the haunting of Villa Diodati, the Siberian wasn't actually on the same page as the Cyberman.
There was a kind of resistance there.
As if it had its own mind.
That was why Siberian chose the Doctor.
Exactly.
So there was a kind of, and I don't know what it was, whether that was a schism, because the Siberian believed in a kind of pure cyber race or whatever, or something.
And the lone cyber race of converts, yeah.
Or vice versa of whether the lone Cyberman who would actually be rejected by a pure cyber race still believed in the pure cyber race, whereas the Siberian was more pragmatic because it was more interested in universal domination and less in the specifics of how you are when you achieve that.
So, again, there was something there that piqued my interest, but which never really landed.
yeah but yeah i would have sent it forward into the far future in the middle of a sun
well unless unless you were sending it back because you wanted it to pursue its version of
future history because its version of future history was easier to defeat or what i mean i
don't know that there are endless possibilities in i i would i would have liked to see a little
bit more of this resistance group and what they were doing and what they were thinking and how
they had been fighting the Cybermen and ideally how Captain Jack was helping them because I would
have liked him back and it seems like a Jack kind of thing to be doing to be you know he is he is
this immortal fearless um and somewhat cocky super duper chap who is going to help out the the
underdog yeah it's it's it it's it's right up it i can imagine him being with this small small
group of ragtag resistance fighters in this kind of post-cyber war um humanity laid waste era
but again opportunity missed and and and we won the cyber wars right well i think you would i
think you would call it according to history we won those right because we wiped out uh
yeah i mean how many humans are wiped out are those supposed to be the only seven humans left
in existence or are those no no they clearly weren't they clearly weren't well i hope i hope
not but then if you defeated that huge fleet of cybermen and you left behind a carrier with
thousands of cybermen on it you have not defeated the cybermen no but if there is no way of those
cybermen being wakened then you don't know that you haven't defeated the cybermen and and yeah
history could record one version of events but if if you were wanting to change history and you knew
that all you had to do was trigger that cybership to be awakened then there's your means for doing
it again you know potentially interesting story and and i you know partly what happened in it i
thought the essence of the cybermen because it was the the lone cybermen lone cyberman
reawakening that ship but hey last last thing i'm going to just pick on before i but i actually say
things that i thought were interesting okay um uh the last thing is it a plan is it a plan because
i've still got one of your plans here oh really no it isn't a plan do you want to throw the plan
in first well the other the other plan was the division oh yes well that's the gallifrey plan
yeah yeah well i know i wasn't saying it was your personal plan i meant it was one of the plans you
just enumerated um because you didn't like them so i would just like to say i really didn't like
this either because i couldn't for the life of me see what the point of it was in fact it was
doubly disappointing so one thing is you've got this story about the timeless children
and it gives you the regeneration origin and it gives you the idea that the doctor is an orphan
from a mysterious dimension both of which are ideas that you know i'm okay with i'm not wild
about them but they're fine they're quite interesting and takes the show in an interesting
new direction cramming in this whole extra stuff about the doctor working for a cia precursor
isn't an obvious parallel to that it doesn't well i or possibly subdivision maybe it is a division
of the CIA I don't know but regardless I can't see why that whole idea is necessary other than
to explain a continuity error that occurred in the show 44 years ago which no one literally no one
cares about I obviously some people care about it because we just mentioned Doctor Who fans
if you pick something then someone will care about it but okay hold on so 44 years ago
brain 1976 wasn't it yes okay yeah it sounds about right the other the other reason the
division stuff annoyed what is the continuity error oh it's the the morbius doctors oh oh oh
okay right right all right right okay who who we can now we have a license to assume they were
working for the division although to be honest if you if you watch the sequence in which the doctor
defeats the matrix there's nothing in there that's actually contrary to the idea that
all of this is a lie because it's all stuff from her existing history you know when you see the
footage from brain of morbius it is actually the footage from brain of morbius brain of morbius
yeah which is an adventure that she remembers so it's just something from her actual existing
memory and when you see the footage of the timeless children it is just the stuff that
she's been experiencing in the matrix a minute ago so it is also stuff from her actual memory
so none of it is none of it is proof that there is anything before Hartnell but anyway
that that aside the division as a concept seemed to me completely unnecessary over complicated
and entirely pointless and especially annoying because I got quite intrigued
by the whole Brendan stuff in Ascension of the Cybermen.
I thought it was quite, I thought it was quite,
it was a bit, it was a bit like up,
this kind of fast moving story of his life.
I thought it was very effectively done.
And I found the mystery of why he, you know,
he had aged, but the others hadn't.
I found that quite intriguing.
And then they hadn't aged.
Well, yeah, exactly.
They, yeah, they hadn't aged.
why he didn't die and he came back to life
in exactly the same way that Captain Jack
always comes back to life,
which seemed to me couldn't be a coincidence.
I found that quite intriguing.
And so I liked the way all that was set up
because I like setups,
but I was hoping for some kind of resolution
that went beyond,
actually, this has nothing to do with Ireland.
It's just that,
and this is a bit that loses me,
loses me somewhat that was it who was it who's who hid these memories in the matrix was it tech
yes according to the mass so some some shibogan had decided that the way to hide it in the matrix
was to make it about this somebody else instead of erasing it well yeah but this this 20th this
20th century earth story because obviously all gallifrey all gallifreyans know about earth
in much so the connection must be because anyone anyone who you mentioned gallifrey too who's not
doctor who fan assumes you're talking about somewhere in ireland well gallifrey is ireland
yeah i suppose maybe that's what the metaphor is supposed to be maybe because the doctor because
Because the Doctor has had people, when he says Gallifrey, they go, in Ireland, and he goes, yeah, probably, or something like that.
So maybe that's how the perception filter that was, yeah, I know it doesn't make any sense for somebody who have done this century, millions of years prior to.
And if we go back to Trial of the Time Lord, somebody could probably tell us how long the Time Lords have been a civilization.
Which, if this is true, then the Doctor has been the Doctor through that.
And I can't remember how long it was, but it was a very long time.
Oh, can I pick on another thing that annoys me about The Division?
Yeah.
If Joe Martin is indeed from that era, why is she called the Doctor?
Because just because the doctor is the doctor, the doctor isn't the doctor's name, right?
I mean, unless I guess we're completely overwriting the Moffat area, which Chibnall does seem somewhat keen to do.
But it's like, why would the doctor be called the doctor?
I thought the doctor was a nickname that came from when the doctor was in the academy, which was the period when the doctor was young William Hartnell with the master.
Because Chibnall didn't think this out very far.
That's why.
Hmm.
I mean, no, I think it's absolutely,
it's got to be a continuity,
a continuity, because it's not continuity.
It's a retcon failure.
But he's not just retconning it.
I mean, so the kind of the point with a capital P
of this whole having their division in there,
as far as I could tell,
was that it gave the Doctor a slightly unsavoury past
that she could be uncomfortable with momentarily
before she decides, oh, it's not who you were,
it's who you are now in the moment.
And okay, there's our lesson for today.
This is what this story is all about.
Except, hang on a moment, in order to do this,
they seem to have had to use amnesia to,
or it's not memory wiping, whatever,
however, whatever is the appropriate time.
I'm not a psychologist here,
but I want to point out that I think this is more complicated
than it's given credit for.
Because if your memory gets wiped,
it can be wiped in a number of ways, right?
I mean, if you've forgotten something,
that could be,
I've forgotten what the capital of Belarus is,
which actually I have.
Is it Minsk?
Anyway.
I'm going to just go out on a limb in here
and say I have no idea
what the capital of Belarus is ever.
So I haven't forgotten.
Okay, so you haven't even forgotten it.
But if you knew what it was,
you could forget it.
And that probably, you know, if you had some kind of memory wiping thing, it could do things like wiping out little bits of memory, a bit like a retcon pill slipped into your drink would do for the past 24, 48 hours or whatever it is, I forget.
So you've got something like that.
But then, I mean, there are other instances where people forget, like if you have severe brain damage as a result of an illness or an accident or whatever, you could forget how to use a knife and fork.
You could forget how to speak English.
The doctor forgets who he has been before he is William Hartnell.
This is this seems to be what we are told.
but it but it's not just forgetting those kind of identity but it's also forgetting a load of
like the doctor has been a traveler in time and space piloting a tardis and all sorts of knowledge
goes along with that presumably the doctor has been through the gallifreyan education system
so he's going back to the academy and reload relearning a bunch of stuff that he knew before
so presumably that has all been wiped but why i mean because it's a bad plan
it's it's a it's a dalek level stupid plan that's why it's just like yeah it does seem like we need
a bit more information about what exactly is being wiped here because you when it's something like
this it's not as simple as just saying oh yeah the doctors had their memory wiped because memory
isn't singular like that it's much it's much more of a complex thing and if and if it was a if it
was a question of you know basically being completely wiped everything everything you ever
knew everything you ever remembered but also all of your kind of lit you know right down to your
motor memory and things because the whole point of this is the point that Chibnall is trying to
make is about identity raises from a philosophical perspective are you even the same person
If all of those memories have gone because you've regenerated as well.
It's like you're physiologically different.
And the way in which the doctor's identity has been preserved through
regenerations is through memory.
Yep.
Yeah.
No, not, not well thought through, by the way, 10 million years.
Gallifrey.
10 million years of absolute power.
That's what it takes to be absolutely corrupt.
At least if I can believe the internet from that line from Trial of a Time Lord.
So the Timeless Child's really, really old.
Really old.
I don't know where to go with that.
But honestly, I don't care.
This is such a thing that I just don't care about.
It doesn't matter.
Why does it matter?
Yeah, I mean, unless next season we're going to have 10 episodes where the Doctor meets a totally different incarnation.
oh of course that's exactly what this is oh of course next year each episode the doctor will
meet a past unknown incarnation of themselves so they can get the asian doctor and they can get
the the doctor of color well we've already got the doctor of color you know they can go through
all of those cycles so that we can say look anyone can be the doctor so he's going to hit his quota
of all minorities and all or ethnic groups minorities is only correct in terms of where
you live but yeah yeah that's what it is i i have no problem i have no problem with general
increasing representation in this i actually really by this way it would be it would be quite
interesting if the reason for this was to have meeting a different past incarnation of the doctor
in every episode it would it's like it's almost like the sort of the doctor who unbound um series
that big finish did where what what you saw was a was a different kind a different version of what
the doctor might have been if different choices had been made in the way the television show was
made and in a sense what Chibnall has done with this quite deliberately is to say let's embrace
everything anything goes the Doctor is essentially infinite in who she can be and so if his reason for
doing that was to open out and explore these different possibilities as stories within
themselves well I found a number of those unbound stories actually really quite interesting stories
despite their being a bit nerdy in their pretext.
So there's potential for that,
but I don't think that there is anything as daring as that being proposed.
I think actually this whole thing is much more conservative.
The two aspects, the one thing I wanted to say,
the one other thing I wanted to pick on was the ending.
You ended on a cliffhanger.
Has to be the lamest cliffhanger ever,
not only do they put her in something that reminds me of storm cage which we know can't hold river
song i mean he did anyone watching this show think well that's anything more than a minor
inconvenience trap that and then no but if you don't make it bad enough by doing that which just
gives the appearance of this is not a prison that the doctor is going to have any trouble getting
out of you put up the name revolution of the daleks coming in the next episode you go so
it's got nothing to do with this prison anyway so well we don't know we don't know that surely
surely the fact that it's it has to you know the jadun aren't working for the daleks you know the
jadun aren't working for the daleks but you don't know why you don't know
or i don't know i mean obviously i would prefer it if it didn't have no i think it's already been
filmed i i i would be happy if it didn't have the daleks in it i don't really understand why
no it's probably bbc marketing who have said no you must put daleks back in um because people
will tune in to watch it if they know the daleks are in it and when you did revolution sorry
resolution god this is even worse than um what were the 80s ones called um revelation
revelation and remembrance yeah revelation and remembrance whereas resolution and revolution
they're literally just one letter changed um but yeah i guess i guess we've gone back to having to
have the daleks in the title to make sure people tune in so the only uh maybe not the only you
you did mention riversong i did it did just remind me of something which is why is it the
river song can regenerate um darn good question because she's a tardis baby that's why she's got
a time head or whatever it is that rat smith talks about and therefore the the implication
of that is that regeneration is a product of being in the vortex or something not having your
gene spliced from a baby that you just found who's fallen from in another dimension yeah just saying
yeah but that's moffat era and we're erasing that as best we possibly can okay i i guess the only
thing that i'm going to say in benefit to this plan is i don't think it's a good plan i don't
think that the timeless child is the timeless child the whole doctor more mystery yeah the
chibnall master plan it's like it does not deserve the word master although it is it is
master master in it it is a master plan in it but it is not a master plan um it is yeah it
the only thing i say going for it is that unless you are correct and that the joe martin doctor
is after Hartnell, it at least doesn't screw up the actual known canon of the show.
It is worded in such a way that...
But I think there are two reasons for that.
Yes, everything you knew about Gallifrey and growing up,
and apart from the fact that you're genetically identical to them,
and all that stuff, at least that's all still there.
That wasn't wiped out in a,
oh, you've just forgotten that we planted false memories or something in there.
that he's just trying to go this is just yet another cycle so you regenerate and then eventually
you get put back to baby form and then you start again for some illogical reason but that's where
it starts falling apart but at least they didn't screw up the hartnell to whitaker but you can't
you can't screw up the show's canon for two reasons of course you can one one is the show
is already full of contradictions so really adding more contradictions isn't going to change much
and two is you can't you can't you know you can't change the show as it's gone before i mean you
can't wipe that out unless you literally are the department in charge of wiping out the bbc's
videotapes in which case yes you can wipe it out because they did that didn't they but yeah apart
from that uh that's what it had that's what it had going for it was if he was going to take a
had to do it at least he picked one that didn't what he would have to do wasn't the worst possible
he'd have to literally track down every every recorded copy of the moffat era show and destroy
it and and even then he would miss some of the soundtracks and we'd end up with animations of
the moffat era day of the doctor animated version recreated yeah time of the not not time uh twice
upon a time animated but see that see here's the here's the is the thing with um twice upon a time
that's that's where that's where moffat was trying to do this kind of thing he was inserting into
the 10th planet an additional bit of backstory that's supposed to change the way in which you
view the 10th planet which i pretty much didn't really like and chibnall's just doing that on a
slightly bigger scale but it's fine i can still watch the tenth planet without thinking of twice
upon a time yeah and i don't even really get that he inserted anything meaningful in twice upon a
time i mean so the doctor walked to the tardis and he had a little adventure along the way okay
but not even a good one well that but that is the fact when it comes down to it that that to me is
the problem which is it wasn't twice upon a time was not a good episode the timeless children was
not a good episode and if it had been a good episode any number of contradictions of canon
or whatever i would have just forgotten with them and i've given them a nod because i'd have enjoyed
the episode and that's it's it's like that i i dug it out and stuck it in the comments on the
fusion patrol website under the haunting of villa d'adati which is a piece from an interview that
Tom Baker gave to Doctor Who magazine in the 1980s saying yes we didn't we didn't think about
the show's continuity he didn't care what John Pertwee had done Graham Williams wasn't you know
thinking about what the what had been previously established in the show the thing that guided
them was that whatever Doctor Who they were making they wanted to make it the best one yet
you can argue that they didn't always do that but that was what they were looking for not trying to
fit it in with the the way the show's continuity had gone in the past and the haunting of Villa
Diodati is an excellent example of that because we're saying well it doesn't fit it's really
really difficult to make it fit with what is established in Mary's story from the company of
friends but does anyone really care about that because it's a damn good episode and that's what
matters well but what what point do you say well we don't do that now next year so do they go back
to that night again next year next season and tell a completely different story about mary shelly
it's a good one yeah i'm up for it see i don't think that flies i mean at some point you have
reached the point of why bother i mean you just told because it's a good story you just told us
this is what happened and now you're telling but there's timey-wimey you if people care about it
They can pick up on the, you know, we had the Lone Cyberman changing history.
We had the, I can't even remember what it was called in Mary's story, but there was some kind of.
Why make problems for yourself?
Why not tell a good story somewhere else?
They could have told a good story anywhere else.
They don't have to go back.
And, you know, when you go back over established continuity, you are making a continuity error.
They have people whose jobs aren't supposed to prevent continuity errors.
And I don't think that they came up with a different story for the destruction of Atlantis because they just said, eh.
Perhaps in the 70s because, well, we've wiped them all and nobody cares.
But you just don't do that.
And the fact that Tom Baker says it, well, so what?
He's an actor.
Yeah, sure.
His job is to bring whatever you put in front of him to life and does it well.
But somebody's job is to not, if you're telling this story, to keep it at least semi-sensical.
And this is all just nonsense instead of just going out and telling new stories.
That's all they need to do.
They do not need to go back and redo old stories or tell you a new way.
Just go make new stories.
You've got an entire universe in all of time and space to go to.
You do not need to keep going back to the same thing because you thought you had a better idea than the last guy that did.
No, no. But there's a difference between going back to the previous thing because you think you've got a better idea than the guy before.
Or just telling the best story you can.
And if it turns out that as that idea is forming, there's some continuity correction or whatever, fine.
You know, don't worry about that stuff because that's not the important stuff.
What is important, and I entirely agree with you here, is just, you know, move the thing forward, move the show forward.
Can the Doctor die now?
I don't think there's ever been a, you know, regeneration has never been, it will always happen, has it?
well but that's because that's the way it is with time lords but the doctor isn't
the doctor is the time but it's it's it's the same it's the same thing you know time lords
have just got the regeneration from well i don't know like i mean
it's just another another question along the along but it's an unimportant question it doesn't matter
no one's going to care about that question because anyone watching it is going to know
well actually the doctor can't die the doctor can't die because if the doctor died that would
be the end of the show and the show will never end it changes it changes how a character would
act so i'm not talking about from the the audience standpoint i'm talking about from the internal
standpoint captain jack behaves differently than a regular human being because captain jack knows
that he's immortal captain jack believes he's immortal he's got ample evidence that says it's
basically true but at some point well it's that's why it's you know if you're the person that the
thing that changes his behavior is not whether it's true or not it's whether he believes he
believes he didn't know he was immortal he wouldn't behave in that way yes my point being
is that the doctor has until this point believed that you know 12 regenerations were the limit
And then they got this other thing where the Time Lords gave him a few more, but we don't know how many more.
So the Doctor always could walk out of this going, yeah, who knows?
My next one should be my last.
Maybe I shouldn't charge across the field towards the bullets just in case, unless that is a sacrifice of death.
No, she didn't.
It was always the case that she didn't want to die and regenerate because.
There's a difference between I don't want to die and regenerate and I don't want to die, die, dead, done.
This is it. I'm over.
I mean, Matt Smith showed us that because at the end he went into his sort of melancholy over, you know, this is it.
I'm the end, I'm the done.
Yeah, I didn't like that much.
So if that's the option of saying, actually, yeah, you can have an infinite number of regenerations, then I'm up for that.
And does that mean that these regenerations are in any way different and or more powerful?
Because if the doctor has gone through 10 million years of this, then surely they haven't had one where somebody chopped his head off, you know, or something.
I mean, something we don't know.
We don't know whether that inhibits.
The only time I'm aware of being anything that inhibits regeneration is some kind of Time Lord doohickey that says, oh, the phaser is set to regeneration inhibiting mode or something.
I mean, it's...
Would that work on the Doctor?
It really, really doesn't matter because it's dealt with on a story-by-story basis if regeneration is going to cause an issue with the plot.
Do you have anything good to report on these stories?
Well, I've reported on Ascension of the Cybermen, so that was good.
I don't think I have anything else good.
We've given basically zero time on the Companions.
Oh, the Companions.
Yes, I did have something to say about the Companions.
Absolutely not a word about them.
Because we've talked about the Companions throughout the series
and how their underuse was going to need to lead to some sort of comeuppance, I guess,
or the way in which the Doctor was treating them as pets was going to lead to some comeuppance.
i tell you what i think about the companions in this episode like the cybermen they shouldn't
have been in it because they had nothing to do this was a doc i mean even the doctor really
shouldn't be in this episode because she doesn't do anything herself it's it seems to me a really
bad way again structural problem bad way to structure the episode where the doctor is
literally incapacitated for 45 minutes but the the companions are actually in a worse
position because they they have nothing to do there's the there's the scene where graham
goes on about how brilliant yaz is where you think right yaz is literally about to peg it
in the next five minutes but that doesn't happen either i i i can't understand and ryan's learned
not to use guns why why wouldn't it have been better to write the companions out at least for
this episode yeah they could have done that there are there are two things i wanted there are two
things i would have wanted from this this series um into you know in overall terms regardless of
whether the fact that there were some good episodes as well as some real clunkers and it and it and
it's this that either the companions was more was made of them or they were written out i think in
a way you could have you could have done but because you've never had entire episodes where
you just said actually this is a doctor a doctor solo episode because there really isn't anything
for the companions to do so why write them in we've established the fact that the doctor sometimes
goes off traveling on her own make this one of those episodes and there are a number of episodes
where you could just you look at the episode and you go well this would have been better
if it had been the doctor on her own plus you know whatever incidental characters have been
written in for this story alone and then there are other there are there could have been other
episodes where the companions were the focus of the episode it didn't have to be all about the
doctor we actually focus in on the companion and part of their story and move move their character
on and we didn't get any of that throughout this series at all i just for those people who are
saying oh my goodness me how much better this season has been compared to the last whitaker
season i don't understand it because last season we got real development for the companions and
there was a there was a kind of there was a proper arc to their stories i i i feel like
if i'm summarizing um from our discussions of last season in this season that you thought last
season was a lot better uh i i did i would agree with you uh with regards to character development
for the companions okay but i thought it was new it was not original but i did not think it was
very good uh i personally don't think that no i don't think it's better or worth no or this it
was the same okay they're pretty much the same that's interesting i see a lot of people saying
they think this season better i have seen that and i was assuming anyone would say this season
is worse regardless of whether they liked the previous season or not it's like what all the
things that made the previous season particularly interesting or exciting for me were to do with
the fact that we had a new take on the Doctor, a new actor playing the Doctor, combined with a new
set of characters who were her companions, and then we had a whole series of stories that didn't
rely on any of the show's continuity whatsoever, so there were no recurring monsters or anything
like that. All of the stories were new and original, and we got to take it to some interesting
places including you know the partition of india we got to meet those parks we got you know which
trials you're all of this kind of stuff and i enjoyed all of that because it was new and then
suddenly it's like oh we're going we're going to have daleks we're going to have cybermen we're
going to have jadoon we're going to have gallifrey we're going to have the master we're going to have
the Time Lords were going to have every little piece of the show's canon is going to be picked
over for some kind of spurious story reason and it really has bogged it down and that's exactly
the reason I think that RTD was very careful about it in the first place and it is the reason I had
assumed that Chibnall steered clear of it in the previous season and it makes no sense to me that
he suddenly reversed that i'm trying to put on balance i cannot remember any particularly good
episodes last season i can't remember any particularly good episodes this season
i'll maybe i'll maybe i'll go on a limb and say yes this one's a little bit worse because it did
have a little bit more of having boards smacked up the back side of my head which i don't like
so yeah all right this one's worse but i don't didn't think the other one was good so i would
not put i would not rate last year as a good year no but then you wouldn't rate season 26 as a good
year which one's season 26 the 1989 season said sylvester mccoy uh no probably not a great year
no i might have i might have rated it better than last year or this year oh that's interesting
because yeah i know you rate it quite low whereas i actually think and the blu-ray of it has just
come out and so i've kind of been diving back into it but it is it's one of those seasons that
i do here's a thought experiment you know you you asked the question about somebody who just
started watching with jody whitaker yeah um doctor who i think there's another question if doctor who
had just started with jody whitaker the show wouldn't have made it to a second season i think
that's and it would not be it would be gone it would i think that's what i mean i we we yeah
there's no way of proving that but right that my my gut reaction to that is i i thought last year
there was a huge amount of critical acclaim for it but all that critical acclaim was coming about
from people who are contrasting it to the old if if you had never heard of the concept of doctor
who you had never had any of that and you just came at this show it just wasn't that interesting
well that's not for me i mean i i i loved the previous season mostly um well yeah actually
really quite yeah so it it went it went for me from being a great season to another great season
just in a very very different way whereas this has gone to being not different enough i guess
but the things that are different are markedly worse.
Well, obviously this is going to be a long one,
but that's only fair because it was a long episode of Doctor Who.
And I don't know about you,
I was checking my phone at a couple points along the way.
I didn't check my phone, but I did watch it.
Unusually, I watched it with my dad,
who I wasn't particularly expecting to like it anyway.
And he loved it.
no okay he said he said i he said how long was that and i said an hour and five minutes and he
said was that all was it only an hour and five i thought it was an hour i don't understand why
i know it's an hour and five i think he said i don't understand why anyone would but there you
go you're like him you thought it was longer i don't understand why anyone would watch this show
why why wouldn't they read flower bird instead but there you go it's not for everyone it's not
for everyone but i am happy and relieved that there is no more doctor who until later in the
year we can we can go back to fun stuff like i really feel bad about feeling that way much
i i i genuinely feel bad about feeling that way but it's like i i'm looking forward to the gap
between the episodes better than i am more episodes i i yeah i i think about on balance
this season doesn't feel like it's delivered a whole lot of fun for me there are episodes i will
enjoy re-watching i'm always glad of new doctor who but the reality is we're we're actually in
a sort of golden age of this stuff because there's so much doctor who being produced if you if you
listen to the audios as i do that there's plenty of it to tickle your fancy whatever it is that
does tickle your fancy so um it i yes i won't i won't be missing it in the gap certainly not in
the way that i felt i missed it after the previous season because it was so distinctive and there was
nothing else like it well we don't do this very often but i can tell you what next week's episode
a fusion patrol will be oh what's it gonna be we're gonna be looking at the bbc
2019 or early
2020 2019 I think
War of the Worlds
Oh yes
Before we get back to our regular stuff
No spoilers about what we thought of that
We're trying to keep it upbeat
Simon thank you for joining me
It's a pleasure as always
Listeners
I hope you'll join us all again next time
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