Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor leaves it until now to make his first appearance, and it’s with his last story. Well, what should be his last story, but for reasons of production isn’t. Twice Upon a Time has it’s champions – and I’ll always think of it fondly for watching it in Newcastle Cathedral 1 week before broadcast thanks to a special screening by the BBC – but it always feels like an unnecessary coda to me. Putting aside the woeful characterisation of the First Doctor, it seems to exist purely to answer a question no one but Moffat wants the answer to1 – again2 – rather than celebrate the brilliance of this Doctor.
What makes the Twelfth Doctor so special? It’s all in Capaldi, really. His Doctor starts out very arrogant & unlikeable, but that seems driven by a very fragile ego. By series 9 he starts to soften & by 10 he is so much more likeable; he still has the same barbs & put downs, but he’s more comfortable in his skin and better company. You can’t imagine the Doctor of S8 sitting having chips with Clara like he does here with Bill. It’s not that he’s much of a different character from his predecessor: The Doctor is The Doctor, but Moffat presents this Doctor without any filters. He is raw & unprocessed, with nothing to stop his alienness coming to the fore. It’s a characterisation that lends itself to an air of The Doctor having ASD, for better or worse. As a father of a child with ASD I’m not sure how I feel about that: on the one hand it’s good to have a character that could be autistic as the main lead, fully accepted and thriving, but on the other it seems to be played for jokes, as Moffat tends to do with disability in his era3.
The Twelfth Doctor is a hoot, though. He’s hilarious. He can be a little too Malcolm Tucker in S8, punching down at Clara too often, but in stories like Robot of Sherwood – when he’s full on Victor Meldrew – then he’s laugh out loud funny. Capaldi’s greatest gift though is what he can do with a monologue. Much like RTD with Bernard Cribbins, it didn’t take Moffat long to realise what Capaldi & Jenna Coleman were capable of, and he gets more & more grandstanding speeches as his time goes on. Finally, the Twelfth Doctor’s greatest strength is his loyalty & morality: as I said when discussing Heaven Sent, he’s the guy who will punch a wall for a billion years for you. The man who does what he does because it’s right! Because it’s decent! And above all, it’s kind. It’s just that. Just kind.
This story gives us every bit of the Twelfth Doctor. From the start, with him eating crisps as he sends out Missy to test her, to his speech to the Master(s), everything’s there. It’s a greatest hits package – warts and all, as The Doctor’s grandstanding on the bridge of the ship cost him precious time that means he misses Bill’s conversion by hours.
To back up a bit first, this is very much a tale of two stories. World Enough & Time starts off as a classic Moffat script, full of smug wit & meta references as Missy bounds from the TARDIS proclaiming himself as Doctor Who with her two companions, Exposition & Comedy Relief. It’s painfully on the nose but also rather funny I have to admit, but mainly because Michelle Gomez is an absolute genius and can spin those lines into gold. Matt Lucas as Nardole is also a gift for a comedy writer, but Pearl Mackie doesn’t let the side down either.
In a neat twist there’s some clever & for once accurate science that means we get to go all timey-wimey, but not before we have a completely unexpected sucker punch & moment of high drama where Bill has a hole shot in her chest. It comes out of nowhere and leaves you not only with a similar sized feeling in the pit of your stomach, but also wondering how the hell Moffat is going to write himself out of this one. That feeling just gets worse and worse as the episode goes on, as Bill uncovers what we know fine well to be Mondasian Cybermen, before being converted herself. You KNOW Moffat won’t leave her this way, that there’ll be some oh-so-clever resolution, but he really makes you think he will. The scenes with Bill starting to piece together what we as fans already know are the most effective of this story, as we have the tension of anticipation of the big reveal of what those patients actually are.
I remember watching this on broadcast and being more than a little furious that the Mondasian Cybermen had been trailed so heavily so that we knew they were in this episode: it would have been so thrilling to figure it out as the story went on. I wonder if I would have twigged the minute the sack-faced ghouls lurched from the lift or if it would have taken longer; regardless, that moment of realisation would have been superb. Thankfully, I had forgotten John Simm was going to be in this story, and so DID get that thrill when he popped up. I don’t do well with facial recognition so the disguise totally fooled me, and I’m all the happier for it. Knowing what’s coming can help with anticipation and excitement for an episode, but I prefer the thrill of the surprise nowadays4.
Bringing back the Mondasian Cybermen was a bit of a treat for Peter Capaldi, but The Moff really makes them work by giving us their full genesis. The hospital patients with their faces covered, in blood stained robes, only able to communicate their pain through boxes is the stuff on nightmares: Moffat doesn’t dial back on this in the second episode as he makes them scarecrows. Cybermen always work best when the body horror element of them is made good use of, which Moffat really does here: don’t forget he loves telling a horror/ghost story as much as a comedy.
By The Doctor Falls we have The Two Masters for the very first time. John Simm dials his performance right down, making it the best of his three stories, while Michelle Gomez is once again outstanding as Missy, both manic & conflicted. If there’s an issue with this story it’s that we don’t get enough of the Masters: the fallout from Bill’s conversion understandably takes up the majority of the running time in this episode, but what Moffat chooses to spend what time we do have with these two by having them flirt with each other, rather than doing anything interesting. But Simm is delightfully malevolent, you know fine well that he could have sold Bill out at any point, but has waited until The Doctor is two hours away for maximum effect. And Gomez is just brilliant as Missy, selling both sides of the character as her redemption arc comes to a close.
If there’s a second issue with this story then it’s the ending, which I’m sad to say is bobbins. Leaving Bill as a Cyberman would have been a bold production choice that I would have been behind 100%5, but I very much understand that that was never going to happen. Bill was an excellent character that Pearl Mackie did a wonderful job of bringing to life, so I don’t begrudge her a happy ending: it’s just a shame that it’s the same one Clara got. It’s also very deus ex machina, and I expect better from Moffat. I also don’t see why both Masters had to kill each other, or why The Doctor suddenly decided he didn’t want to regenerate – other than the BBC needed to squeeze another episode from him. There’s no explanation for it, so it just doesn’t land.
At least Nardole got a proper send off, with a really touching scene between him, The Doctor & Bill: Matt Lucas is a comedy actor, sure, but he shows here what he can do with some dramatic stuff. It’s also a strong story for him, with plenty to do after spending most of the series moping around in the TARDIS or back at the university. But ultimately this is the Mackie & Capaldi show, their characters quite rightly the focus of the story, and both of them doing excellent work. As I say, this would have been such a high point for them to go out on.
As it would have been Steven Moffat. By this point to was clear to me that it was time for Moffat to move on too, that he was starting to run on fumes a little – in a lot of ways this is also Moffat’s Greatest Hits as well as Capaldi’s, with a story full of laughs, horror, big speeches & character drama. I really didn’t think he had a story this good left in him at this point, and I was delighted to be proved wrong when it went out. I still am, and it part of me wants to think of this as the end of the Moffat Era, then I’m totally happy with that.
COMING TOMORROW: “That was my Coal Hill School tie……“
Skies Full of Diamonds 