Review by Undonejack
VIP4There were a lot of theories about this episode the past week and perhaps the one I believed most was that the human survivors from the Cyber War were going to be revealed as the Timeless Children and that The Master would also reveal that he had destroyed a pre-Timelord Galifrey, thus leaving them to repopulate and begin the Timelords as we know them. Also, the Irish cop Brendan fit in somewhere there too. But, oh boy was I wrong!
SPOILER ALERT
It turns out that the Doctor is the Timeless Child and that she arrived in our universe through the gates she saw in her vision in the last episode. She was discovered by a scientist from Galifrey who raised her until she fell off a cliff and regenerated, where the scientist then dedicated her life to harnessing the Doctor's regenerative abilities, eventually founding the Timelord council with the Doctor's DNA, making every life-form on Galifrey the same species as the Doctor. Before they wiped her memory and made her into a child again.
Sound familiar? That's because the story of Brendan from the last episode was that of the Doctor on Gallifrey. Which was disguised to look like Earth to trick the Doctor if she ever saw it. Well, she did after the Master revealed everything to her. He discovered all of this from some large data bank on Galifrey.
Well, this is going to be interesting...
Let's start with the obvious. This is an immensely ballsy move that has contradicted many existing plot lines from the past, mainly the entire plot of "Time of The Doctor" where the doctor was granted another thirteen regeneration cycles by the Timelord high council.
This new episode has made it so that this plot line was pointless because the doctor is from another dimension or universe, and helped invent the timelords. It was also revealed that the thirteen regeneration rule is an arbitrary rule placed upon the second generation of timelord children for some reason and that this does not apply to the Doctor. Making her effectively immortal in canon.
So there were an unknown number of regeneration in the "pre-Hartnell" era of the show. This is not a new idea because the classic episode "Brain of Morbius" alluded to this concept with Morbius showing the Doctor's past incarnations just before showing eight unknown faces and asking "How far Doctor, how long have you lived?". This was originally meant to confirm that the Doctor lived a life before his so-called "first regeneration" but was eventually scrapped and it became accepted by the fans that the faces shown on-screen were those of Morbius's previous incarnations instead.
Well, old Chibnall just made it canon again and it looks like next season is going to become a lot more complicated.
This conflicts with the aforementioned "Time of The Doctor" and with the reveal of the Doctor being half-human from the '97 movie. And it in all honesty makes no sense that Ruth, the first "pre-Hartnell" Doctor that we meet has a Tardis with a broken Chameleon Circuit that is stuck as a police box because she has not yet visited 1960's London to meet Ian and Barbra.
This entire thing is a mess and I hope that old Chibnall sorts this all out next season.
So, my thoughts:
This episode is convoluted with many plotholes (how come Graham and Yaz can fit inside a Cyberman despite it only being designed to hold a brain? and why weren't they detected? also the Chameleon circuit thing) but I enjoyed the quick pacing and the performance from Jodie Whittaker as always. The CGI and cinematography are still beautiful and the design of the Cyber-Timelords was cool as hell. However, the abnormal abundance of plotholes and the second destruction of Gallifrey make this episode feel cheap and poorly written.
Chibnall is banking on the familiar themes of war and the destruction of Gallifrey just like the Time War with the Daleks. This is lazy writing because all he is doing is recreating those themes with the Cybermen and The Master instead of writing his exciting conclusion that takes the Doctor in new directions.
This episode is a textbook example of a new creative lead coming into a show and taking no care to maintain the previous continuity. I feel that the big reveal is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do feel that it has alienated most of the hardcore fanbase and will inevitably hurt the show in the long run.
I know that Chibnall has some good stories to tell about the series because he is a fan. Unfortunately, he is too concerned with giving the fanbase cheap thrills in the form of sloppy retcons and lazily written storylines with the same thing we've seen time and time again.[/spoiler]
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@undonejack perfectly said, thank you for sharing your well written and constructed review.
