12.39: The Doctor Falls

In which Doctor Who finally gets its final, final finale. And then doesn’t end.

Broadcast: July 2017

Watched: May 2022

“Have you burned?” “I know you’ve fallen.”

This post, like Bill’s wait for the Doctor to rescue her, is going to go on forever. I apologise in advance. 

As ever with a Moffat finale, it’s an utter headfuck, structurally, so let’s talk about that first.

• This week’s rug pull/vibe shift is the way, in the pre-credits, we’re suddenly in the country (oh god Henry Scampi really hates horses; didn’t bark at the f*cking cybermen did he). Then we cut to the past, with the Doctor being held captive, featuring black and white flashbacks to the stuff we’ve missed – Nardole legging it in slow motion, etc. – which are even further in the past. 

• Later on, we get scenes of Bill played by Pearl Mackie, where it seems like maybe the Doctor’s fixed everything... except, everyone’s scared of her. Because he hasn’t. It’s a delusion, like in that film I’m not going to name for spoiler reasons, which Bill would probably reference except for that. This does at least double as a way of making sure you can get actual acting out of her in her last episode.

• The cleverest structural thing of all, though, is: at the start, this feels like a regular adventure, but by the end they’ve all been so through the ringer that it feels utterly appropriate it’s a regeneration story (which, let’s be honest, it is: it’s just one with an hour-long epilogue). The deus ex machina is a cheat. Yet it feels totally earned. 

Then there are two two extremely clever fanboy bits Moffat does while he still has the chance.

1) The Doctor laughing off the Genesis of the Cybermen speech (“People get the Cybermen wrong. There’s no evil plan, no evil genius. Just parallel evolution”) and making clear they’re eternal – basically, he reframes them as the mob, an avatar of spontaneous inhumanity. And he uses a World Shapers reference to do it. [A 1987 sixth Doctor comic which also features a creation of the cybermen.]

2) The decision to include two Masters, the one that hates the Doctor and the one that just wants his approval – literalising the tension that’s been there in the character since the beginning, by turning them into two different characters... and then having them shoot each other in the back, and die laughing hysterically about it. Obviously this was never going to be the Master’s last appearance, and Moffat knew that. But it’d be a great way to go if it was.

While I’m just raving, here, in roughly their order of appearance, are some other amazing things about this episode:

• The Cybermen as scarecrows.

• “Ten years you spent up there chatting, you missed her by two hours.”

• Bill looking in the mirror, or seeing her shadow, and seeing her real self. 

• Nardole just calmly getting on with leading a workforce, and turning a community into an army, and later saying, “I was sort of found”. His role as plot function literalised and a sign of strength. Which makes it more amazing that later on – “You’re wrong you know: quite wrong. I never will be able to find the words”; then waiting for the lift that he knows will never come – he makes me weep like a baby, every time. 

• Actually, the entirety of that last scene with the three regulars – the incredibly ambiguous “Which of us is stronger?” bit; Nardole looking out for Bill, even though she’s a cyberman now – is just perfect. 

• The Master asking cyberbill if she has any old bras and, later, doing his eyeliner.

• “Were you lying?” “No!” “Were you right?” “...no.”

• “Is the future gonna be all girl?”

• Killing the cyberman from the lift using a cybergun, two sonic screwdrivers and an umbrella.

• “By the way, is it wrong... that I...” 

• Best of all: Bill wanting the last thing she ever says to the Doctor to be a reminder that she only fancies girls. 

The biggest thing, though, is the way the heroes say, more than once, that it’s hopeless, so much so that during the final battle we get a reprise of the Shepherd’s Boy [the music from Heaven Sent]... but they just keep fighting anyway. This isn’t a story about winning, it’s one about doing the right thing even though you can’t. Consider the Doctor’s final speech to the Masters, spelling out this lesson, delivered without music and to an audience so disinterested he has to run around to get their attention (Capaldi’s idea, apparently):

“If I run away today, good people will die. If I stand and fight, some of them might live. Maybe not many, maybe not for long. Hey, you know, maybe there’s no point in any of this at all, but it’s the best I can do, so I’m going to do it.” 

The Masters walk off... but never mind the “never eat pears bollocks” in the next one, this is Moffat’s real final statement on Doctor Who.

Other thoughts:

• After he gets Bill killed/converted the Doctor, dramatically, has to die too. There’s no way back.

• It’s classic Moffat that in his last finale the stakes are “protect the kids”. I wonder if they deliberately cast a kid who could be a baby Bill Potts.

• Bill’s tenure feels weirdly short? Every other companion gets more than a year, somehow (Donna has a prologue and epilogue [and soon more!]; Martha comes back the next year). She’s barely here.

• Missy switches sides at the beginning a bit too easily, which makes the Doctor look like an idiot. Then they lean into that by having him asking her, twice, if she’s telling the truth about secretly being on his side, when she’s very obviously lying.

• The Doctor is already regenerating 20 minutes into this episode. It’s actually a bit unclear what finishes him off – is he dying ever since Lie of the Land? Or of the Masters’ attack at the beginning? Or does he die of a broken heart?

• The day for night filming: an attempt to get a spooky effect or budget cuts?

• This time, Moffat writes that if you have two of the same Time Lord in the same place they can’t remember the earlier events. He keeps changing his mind/changing it for plot convenience.

• Capaldi quotes Hartnell as he seems to die. Actually, later on he quotes Smith, too. Does he quote any of the others?

• Also, when the Doctor wakes up he shouts “Sontarans perverting the course of human history!” which four years later will be an actual story. A bit like the reuse of the “Egyptian Goddess on the Orient Express... in space...” bit.

• The exclusion of Rory from the parade of companions really annoys me.

• The cloister bell sounds at the end, because the Doctor is refusing to regenerate and the TARDIS is sad. :(

• When was the last finale to start without a portentous “someone’s going to die/is already dead” thing? Angels Take Manhattan maybe, but before that... Pandorica? The way it comes out of nowhere gives it more punch.