My issue with The Timeless Children on broadcast was very similar to yours: its tonally all over the place and has no actual drama in it. No stakes. No pathos. Turns out the Doctor is a creature that they diefied and stole their biology from. So what? The reason that RTD and Moffat kept their distance from Gallifrey / Time Lord stories is that they are boring unless you make them the villains. Here, we're asked to care about the origins of the society that wear their silly head things AND buy into an origin story for them that makes no sense and care that The Master has murdered them all... agian. When we know it'll probably be undone again. Wouldn't it have been more interesting to have them all imprisoned by The Master? Answering for their supposed crimes?
I think its very funny that they have Sacha Dhawan do a dance like the one fom Joker. Just as the Cybermen become mega cool and scary and wild they become irrelevant. Chibnall can't even keep consistent within a single script though: throughout part one we establish that these Cybermen are nigh-on invincible, but there's a part where Graham agrees to sneak onto the cybermen ship and plant bombs, and achieves this within 5 minutes of planning it on screen and the ship getting blown up.
It's just boring. Say what you want about any Doctor Who finale being overwrought, over the top, implausible, mad, solved by crazy duex ex machina, or just weird, but all of Chibnall's finales are just boring.
What I find even more annoying is that Flux then has an even better twist on this backstory and wastes it even more spectacularly. :(
I mean, I like this part two much more than part one but almost entirely for the 'fam' bit of the story; the Master monologuing the plot at the Doctor is terrible and it only works because Dhawan is exceptionally good and carries the whole thing.
Harsh. But entirely fair.
My issue with The Timeless Children on broadcast was very similar to yours: its tonally all over the place and has no actual drama in it. No stakes. No pathos. Turns out the Doctor is a creature that they diefied and stole their biology from. So what? The reason that RTD and Moffat kept their distance from Gallifrey / Time Lord stories is that they are boring unless you make them the villains. Here, we're asked to care about the origins of the society that wear their silly head things AND buy into an origin story for them that makes no sense and care that The Master has murdered them all... agian. When we know it'll probably be undone again. Wouldn't it have been more interesting to have them all imprisoned by The Master? Answering for their supposed crimes?
I think its very funny that they have Sacha Dhawan do a dance like the one fom Joker. Just as the Cybermen become mega cool and scary and wild they become irrelevant. Chibnall can't even keep consistent within a single script though: throughout part one we establish that these Cybermen are nigh-on invincible, but there's a part where Graham agrees to sneak onto the cybermen ship and plant bombs, and achieves this within 5 minutes of planning it on screen and the ship getting blown up.
It's just boring. Say what you want about any Doctor Who finale being overwrought, over the top, implausible, mad, solved by crazy duex ex machina, or just weird, but all of Chibnall's finales are just boring.
What I find even more annoying is that Flux then has an even better twist on this backstory and wastes it even more spectacularly. :(
I mean, I like this part two much more than part one but almost entirely for the 'fam' bit of the story; the Master monologuing the plot at the Doctor is terrible and it only works because Dhawan is exceptionally good and carries the whole thing.