Holistic Review: I don't know when I last enjoyed watching a Doctor Who story more.

Last week, I predicted that the season finale was likely to be a barn-burner of an episode... and gee whiz, was I ever on the money. The Timeless Children (as I'll call this two-parter for short — alas, it looks like the 'umbrella title' trend has ended as quickly as it reappeared) practically blows up Doctor Who mythology as we knew it; smartly, not by rewriting the book, but rather by adding whole new, and almost entirely unexplored, chapters — nay, volumes — to the series history.

The story divides pretty neatly into three primary plot threads: the threat posed by Ashad's attempt to resurrect the nearly-eradicated Cybermen, the Master's plan to use the ruins of Gallifrey to incubate a new hybrid master-race, and the revelations about the Doctor's history. I'll delve into each one in turn, saving the most momentous for last.

1. the Cybermen

The re-emergence of the nearly-extinct Cyber-army fuels the intense drama of the first episode, Ascension of the Cybermen. On first viewing, the tension is almost literally unbearable, mainly because, as usual, the production team were really good about keeping a tight lid on spoilers. Being a season-ending story, it was entirely possible that we would be losing one or more of the regular cast, and just enough key information had slipped out prior to its airing to make that possibility seem likely-if-not-certain. I somehow never entertained the possibility that everyone would be leaving, but at least one departure seemed all but assured. The question was, who would it be?

Given his new leading role in AMC drama 61st Street, an announcement which leaked on January 23rd (a few days before Fugitive of the Judoon aired), odds seemed pretty high that Tosin Cole wouldn't be returning next year. Bradley Walsh, too, has talked about how gruelling he finds the show's filming schedule, though because his highly-regarded performance has won plaudits from all corners, I wasn't as certain that his time in the TARDIS was up yet; if the show's creators were determined to hold onto someone, I reasoned, it would be him. Mandip Gill seemed the least likely to depart, both because of her personal enthusiasm for the show, which appears not to have diminished one whit despite her character's underuse, and because this season, Yaz — like Clara before her, which might turn out to be a troubling analogy — has been molded into the most Doctoresque of the trio. Then again, rather than making her the most-suited to carry forward, might that character trait become her downfall this week? Anything, it seemed, was likely to happen.

That uncertainty was crucial for ratcheting up the tension throughout the first episode, in which the TARDIS crew and a ragtag band of human refugees desperately try to evade Ashad and his bottom-of-the-barrel (but still formidable) Cyber forces, and — if they can even survive, much less mount an offensive — attempt to stop them from reviving the Cybermen as a universal threat.

My worst fear throughout the episode was that one or more of our companions would meet certain doom, captured and converted by the Cybermen. Impressively, and frustratingly, the story maintained this level of tension throughout, but kept me guessing as to who might be the victim(s). Initially, it appeared that my guess about Ryan's likely departure was correct: when the flying Cyber-head drones strafe the fledgling colony, it's Ryan who gets separated from the others and left behind on a planet with nothing but a squadron of Cybermen. Except that the Doctor gets left behind too, and her audacious escape stratagem — to steal a Cyber-fighter out from under their noses — actually succeeds, whisking them away to the Boundary and out of harm's way.

The Cybermen, instead, pursue the fleeing human vessel, which now boasts Graham and Yaz among its crew. Suddenly the deadly-danger crosshairs are fixed squarely on the two of them, a situation that doesn't relent until the following episode. And boy, do they ever have a time of it: not only are the Cybermen hunting them, their ship runs out of power in the middle of a debris field, condemning them to a suffocating death as the life support runs out. It's only a last-ditch effort to reach safety (more on which later) that saves their lives, and even then, they wind up in the middle of the hornet's nest, on a Cyber war carrier that's literally stuffed with dormant Cyber troops. The scenes on board the war carrier are reminiscent of Earthshock, particularly the shots of the Cyber-army awakening, plus of course the pervading sense of doom. Having given us a momentary reprieve, the tension rises all over again as our heroes explore the carrier, knowing that at any moment the Cybermen could potentially wake up and attack them, and it only gets worse when Ashad's forces track them down, not only hunting them throughout the carrier but commandeering it and awakening their dormant army from suspended animation. The Cyber-terror culminates in the scene of Ashad scrutinizing the Cyber-suits in which our heroes are hiding, fearing that he might be able to detect their breath or lifesigns, and bearing in mind that he possesses cutting tools that can pierce Cyber-armor. (After he finally leaves, the hilarious shot of Cyber-Yaz darting forward to see if Ashad has gone is a great way to relieve the tension!)

But in the second part, Yaz and Graham cleverly stage another miraculous escape, and the target moves back to Ryan, who's now — yet again — stranded on a near-deserted planet that's being invaded by trigger-happy Cyber forces. It's basically nonstop tension and worry until the Cybermen finally depart for Gallifrey, and our Cyber-disguised friends stage an unlikely but brilliant rescue. (Though they're lucky that Ryan doesn't shoot them before they take their headpieces off!)

This unrelenting pressure-cooker of a plotline is really well done. The Cybermen are a credible and palpable threat throughout the story, in a way that the revival hasn't quite shown them before, despite the renewed focus on the horrors of conversion in World Enough and Time. Cybermen, it seems, are more viscerally terrifying one-on-one or in small groups, and Ashad's vindictive personality makes a huge difference.

The only real downside to this plot thread is the matter of Ashad's Cyber-army. Presumably he's scraped them together from the last few surviving troops after the final battle? But their tenacious continued existence leads to a couple of very important questions, which are more than easy to overlook in the heat of the action, but nevertheless do dent the plot believability just a bit:

1. Why, if the Cybermen are on the verge of extinction, do Ashad and his Cybermen shoot every single one of the human refugees dead, rather than converting those valuable organic bodies to swell their ranks? That is, after all, their ultimate goal, as I understand it: to re-establish the glory of the Cyber-empire.

2. Ashad must have known where the last few remaining Cybermen were, in order to gather them together for an attack on the refugee colony. (Either that, or there are many more living Cybermen than we realize, and Ashad just press-ganged the first lot he came across.) If that's the case, then he — or the Cyberium — must have some way to monitor the status and location of viable Cyber-troops. In which case, how was he unaware of the troop carrier's existence, with its massive and intact army in stasis? Why wasn't that his first stop?

This leads into a related point, which is: after the massive buildup from a multi-episode arc about the dreadful importance of the Cyberium, and the devastation that Ashad will wreak should it fall into his hands... it really doesn't have much impact on the plot. Not that the story needs it — Ashad and his Cyber-troops are plenty fearsome without its additional menace — but in terms of narrative payoff, it feels like a bit of a letdown. We do get a throwaway line revealing how it wound up in Regency-era Switzerland, so at least there aren't any dangling threads. But by my reckoning, the Cyberium only really makes two contributions to the plot: providing Ashad with an analysis that indicates the Cybermen are likely to defeat the Doctor, and magicking up the Death Particle. Regarding the first point, well... I guess 'infallible' is not a word one can use to describe the Cyberium. The latter point does at least warrant the Cyberium's inclusion in the plot, even though it leads to a total deus ex machina resolution that's only thinly justified by the scripting. (And the Death Particle is explained, horror of horrors, by yet another mysterious prophecy. I thought we'd left those behind in the RTD era! Thankfully, the prophecy's only function is to confirm the Death Particle's existence for the Doctor.) Then again, the Master winds up merged with the Cyberium at the story's end, so there's no telling what mischief the two of them might manage in future. Perhaps, like last season's mention of the Timeless Child, we're playing another long game, and the true danger of the Cyberium was not what Ashad would do with it, but its symbiosis with the Master. Speaking of whom:

2. the Master

At the end of part one, the Master makes a #surprisenotsurprised appearance to further taunt the Doctor. (I know I should've seen it coming, but it still gave me a shock! I'm so pitiful sometimes. Well, we didn't expect him to leap out of the Boundary, did we?)

The Boundary — a conduit that unfolds out of nowhere, and transports anyone who enters it to an ever-changing unknown destination — is intriguingly unexplained. Its unexpected link to Gallifrey seems likely to be a consequence of the Master's involvement, given that he's clearly tracked the Doctor to this planet; for all we know, the Master's only just created the conduit, and its legendary roulette-like wormhole abilities are a side-effect of the Master's tampering rippling backwards (and probably forwards) through time and space.

His plan is twofold: first, to spring on the Doctor the 'awful' truth about her origins, and second, to repurpose the remaining Time Lord bodies into Cyber-Time-Lord hybrids.

To be totally honest, I'm of two minds about his 'hybrid' plot. On one hand, it seems to have been included purely to give the Cybermen a role in the second half of the finale. But on the other, it's nice to have a plot that's worthy of the Master's brilliance. So often he gets himself involved in these trivial little schemes, as if he's just trying to amuse himself or keep the Doctor busy by fomenting an alien invasion or wreaking havoc on the Earth. But this, this is an audacious and high-level plot that few people would even think of, much less have the remotest chance of executing successfully. Why exactly the Master wants control of an army of Cybermen with regenerative capability, we don't really know — though he's bananas and power-mad, and does he really need any more reason than that? — but it's certainly an astonishing sight when a dead Cyberman regenerates and comes back to life. And as a personal army, you could definitely do worse.

Likewise, his rationale for razing Gallifrey, finally explained in greater detail, is thought-provoking. As the Master himself confesses: "You can see, you can see why I'm angry? A little, little piece of you is in me. All I am is somehow because of you, and believe me when I say, I cannot bear that!" On first viewing, I found it unconvincing that the Master could possibly perceive the Doctor's long-buried secret as a betrayal so deep that it would provoke him to destroy all of Gallifrey; but maybe for the Master, it is. It's entirely motivated by the Master's long, borderline-irrational rivalry with the Doctor. After so many centuries of mostly-bitter enmity, and occasional moments of undiluted hatred, the Master learns that his entire nature — everything that makes him a Time Lord, down to the genetic level — originates from the Doctor's biodata. And it's all the Time Lords' fault; they're the ones who chose to experiment on the Child, to incorporate her genetic code into their own, to found their society on the advances she provided, and then to bury the secret so deeply that not even the Child herself was aware. Discovering that the Doctor is intrinsically a part of him, her genome scaffolding his own, must have felt like a massive betrayal topped off with bitter self-loathing, and that's no doubt a potent combination for someone as reactionary and psychotic as the Master. So, yeah — in hindsight, I can see why his reaction was to burn the Citadel to the ground. And in that light, his decision to essentially desecrate the Time Lord bodies, perverting their regenerative abilities to create a new Cyber-master-race, could easily be interpreted as his way of punishing the Doctor. If Time Lord genetics and regenerative capability all stem originally from her, then just watch how he debases what's left of their 'tainted' people. (Excluding himself, of course.)

Interestingly, even despite the depths of his rage, the Master still seems to feel a kinship with the Doctor; witness how he prepares her for the truth with an idiosyncratic combination of tenderness and sadism. The experience almost seems to bond them together, perhaps because they're now the only two who know the truth, and the Doctor is the only other person who can truly grasp the import of his discovery. And yet he despises her, and his people, for it.

The only element of this plot that I still can't really get on board with is the fate of Gallifrey. I really enjoyed having Gallifrey back, and it's gut-wrenching to have it yanked away again, and this time, undeniably razed: not only smashed and burning, but now every last speck of organic life on the entire planet destroyed. I can only hope that our spirits have been crushed specifically to set us up for another glorious "Gallifrey has returned, again" moment in a future season, but that does risk returning to the same well too often.

One potentially important detail jumps out at me: if the Cybermen were able to regenerate, that implies that the Time Lord 'bodies' that the Master used to create them weren't dead yet. (I wonder why they didn't regenerate after the Master's attack? Perhaps he was holding them in stasis.) Is there any chance that this could provide a loophole for bringing Gallifrey back? Might there be many more Time Lord bodies in stasis, which the Death Particle wouldn't have affected? The Master does claim that the Death Particle will wipe out all the bodies in the vaults, and all organic life "forever", but... well, I can dream.

3. the Doctor

And now we get to the real meat of this story: its revelations about the Doctor's past. And my theories were so, so wrong.

For a fandom who loves few things more than obsessively pedantic organization — making lists of our favorite Doctors, companions, and stories; insisting on consistent designs across book and DVD spines, then arranging them typically in chronological order; and, most pertinently, retconning continuity errors into a single coherent timeline — what emerges in this story is, understandably, extremely divisive. We do not, on the whole, look kindly on any changes which threaten to upset the status quo, especially once we finally have everything in a pleasing order. (The outcry over this story reminds me, albeit to an even greater degree, of the brouhaha over how or whether the War Doctor was going to affect our numbering system; plus this story directly contradicts Marc Platt's novel Lungbarrow.) So, before I delve into the details of what we learn, I want to declare my allegiance immediately: I absolutely love this plot twist. There are so many ways that it could've gone wrong, and yet somehow, in my opinion at least, Chibnall has posited a remarkably thorough unified theory, which successfully incorporates an impressive array of disparate plot elements — including several left dangling from earlier eras — without creating massive plot holes or inconsistencies.

The easiest way to discuss this foundation-upending plot development, I think, is to go point-by-point through the reasons why it thrills me to my core.

It finally provides long-awaited answers...

Season 12 is far from the first instance of a showrunner hinting at a deeply-embedded mystery with the potential to rock series continuity to its foundations, but it is arguably the first to actually deliver on that promise. Remember when Steven Moffat teased us with 'the oldest question in the universe'? Yeah, that was a lot of buildup, stretching as far back as Silence in the Library, for a question that he never intended to answer. The secret of the Doctor's true name was, wisely, dropped, because Moffat knew that it was going to be awfully difficult to find an answer that fans would find satisfying. Not to mention that revealing the truth threatened to ruin a key element of the Doctor's mystique, for very little payoff.

Well, folks, this is how you do it properly.

Although Chibnall doesn't reveal the Doctor's true name here, we do learn the Doctor's actual origins... sort of. According to the Master (whom, for once, we have no reason to doubt, though we don't know how he came by this information), the Doctor is an apparent foundling who was discovered by an ancient Shobogan space-explorer named Tecteun, who adopted the child and brought her back to Gallifrey before making the crucial discovery that the child — unlike Gallifreyans at the time — possessed the ability to regenerate her entire body after a fatal injury. Naturally, as a scientist, Tecteun was overwhelmed with curiosity, and studied her adopted child until she finally learned to understand regenerative science, a breakthrough that she was able to share with the rest of her people.

This revelation finally provides brand-new details about the origins of both the Time Lords in general, and the Doctor in particular. Now we know that the Doctor is not, and never has been, Gallifreyan. However, their histories are very much entwined: the Time Lords owe their culture and their very existence entirely to the Doctor. This is huge, to the point that it could upend everything we've ever believed about who the Doctor is.

Depending on how it's handled, a spur-of-the-moment plot twist like this could invalidate series history, fundamentally rewrite the lead character, and/or shatter decades' worth of continuity... so why doesn't it? And why does it actually work?

...but it doesn't answer everything.

First and foremost, while Chibnall does actually provide tangible, satisfying answers to a question that's been hanging over our heads for 57 years, those answers don't seal the book on the Doctor's story. Even though we now have this rich addition to the Doctor's history, there's still a lot that we don't know.

Chief among those questions: who is the Doctor, really? If she's not actually a Time Lord, what is her true species, and where do they come from? Are her people really from a completely different dimension?

What hit me, as I watched this story, is that The Timeless Child is basically the Cartmel Masterplan, executed differently but with the same laudable vision. For those who aren't familiar with the term, during the Sylvester McCoy era, incoming script editor Andrew Cartmel decided that what the series was missing was a sense of mystery about the Doctor's origins. For the show's first six years, the audience had no idea who the Doctor was or where he was from, but that mystery was gradually whittled away following the introduction of the Time Lords in The War Games. By the mid-'80s, it seemed like we knew all the crucial details about the Doctor's history, to the point that the series was both happily wallowing in nostalgia, and considering shaking things up (like implying that the Master was the Doctor's brother, or — in the short story Birth of a Renegade — that Susan wasn't really the Doctor's granddaughter). So Cartmel's idea was to introduce hints that the Doctor wasn't really who he seemed, with the idea being, apparently, that the Doctor was secretly one of the founding members of Time Lord society, on par with Rassilon and Omega. Though this suggestion was ultimately expanded upon in the New Adventures novels, the TV series was cancelled before it could be made canonical, and upon its return, the Cartmel Masterplan was dropped. What Chibnall has done is essentially the same thing: he's reintroduced mystery to the character, while giving the Doctor a revised background that links her to the very foundations of Time Lord society.

It retcons numerous unresolved plot points stretching back decades.

Impressively, this new Chibnall Masterplan incorporates hints from throughout the classic series about a hidden past for the Doctor, including those laid by Cartmel. The seventh Doctor was clearly aware that he was "far more than just another Time Lord", and whatever this mysterious backstory was, Lady Peinforte thought it was shocking enough to make good blackmail material. Then again: is it possible that Lady Peinforte was actually talking about this revelation, of the Doctor's origins, but he didn't realize it at the time?! She does specifically tell Ace that she knows "where he came from, who he is" and that it involves "the old time [of Gallifrey], the time of chaos", knowledge that she gleaned from the Gallifreyan statue of Nemesis. It's entirely possible that she was about to reveal a secret that even the seventh Doctor didn't know (but arrogantly assumed that he did), in which case it's pure luck that Lady Peinforte didn't beat the Master to the punch. Either way, I wonder which secret the Doctor was keeping. It seems there's still a hidden layer to our Doctor, yet to be revealed.

It was while watching The Timeless Child that I first experienced what I can only describe as my very own dolly zoom. I've never known what that actually felt like, but part of my brain bloomed with shock and realization as I suddenly thought: this story finally makes the Brain of Morbius theory canonical! Fandom for years has debated the meaning of a scene in that 1976 story, in which the Doctor and Time Lord Morbius, locked in a mental battle of wills, attempt to regress one another to their earliest incarnations... and we appear to witness the Doctor regressing past Hartnell through several earlier faces. Ultimately, it's Morbius who loses the battle, so I've always ascribed to the counter-theory that those unknown faces were Morbius' regenerations, but the fact remains that pre-Hartnell incarnations were the production team's intent. It's always been one of those semi-embarrassing factoids that fandom tends to ignore nowadays, like the many early hints that "Doctor Who" is his real name, or his McGann-era claim to half-human heritage. But now, 44 years later, The Timeless Child actually provides an in-universe justification that could officially retcon it as canon. (How I wish I'd prioritized reviewing Morbius before now!) And mere minutes after I had my little mental dolly zoom, sure enough, clips from that very scene of Morbius appeared onscreen, making it explicit that Chibnall knew exactly what he was doing. My friends, it was like the heavens were spinning around me, and to my astonishment — given how long I've fought against that very interpretation — I absolutely loved it. Before The Timeless Children aired, I would've said that I wasn't a big fan of the pre-Hartnell-incarnations theory; but now, seeing how beautifully Chibnall pulled it off and worked it into existing continuity, I think it's so much better than any of my favorite pet theories.

So in one fell swoop, Chibnall has managed to reconcile dangling plot threads from the Hinchcliffe, Nathan-Turner/Cartmel, and Moffat eras... and also, quite possibly, one of the most infuriating unsolved (and unnecessary) mysteries of the Davies era. It hadn't even occurred to me (until I saw a fan theory posited by @TheWomenOfWho, now @BadWolfArchives, on March 1) that the never-explained and plot-functionless Woman from The End of Time is a dead ringer for Tecteun, and the prevailing theory at the time was that she was the Doctor's mother, which was teeth-gnashingly annoying (and thankfully unconfirmed) at the time, but now makes ABSOLUTE SENSE. Any plot revelation that makes me like the Woman must surely be sheer genius.

Any chance that Chibnall could try his hand at reconciling UNIT dating next?

It enriches known series history by suggesting greater depths to established facts.

To start with a minor illustration, the Doctor has sometimes demonstrated abilities that most Time Lords don't seem to possess. The seventh Doctor, for example, proved able to render someone unconscious with the touch of a finger; could this have been an example of a rare power granted by his apparently-extradimensional origins?

It's almost no surprise that the Doctor has been treated as an outcast and a renegade. After all, as the Master says, the Doctor always behaved as if he were different than everyone else; and it turns out that was true all along, and the upper echelon of Time Lords almost certainly knew it. No wonder they've tried to cut the Doctor down to size throughout her entire life. After all, it's how they've always behaved. There's more than a hint of an implication that the poor Timeless Child was ultimately used as a lab rat by her once-loving adopted mother; Tecteun seems to work her way through an awful lot of regenerations before she masters the science, which suggests that she was repeatedly killing her own child over and over again, just to study the underlying biological mechanisms, with complete disregard for how many regenerations the child might actually have, much less for the trauma that the poor thing was enduring at the hands of their own mother. Once Tecteun has acquired the secret of regeneration, it seems that the other Shobogans were equally callous about the child's fate; the chosen few élite co-opted the child's abilities, leeching off her biology in order to solidify their own power and advance their race. Rather than honoring her, either for her sacrifice or her gift to their civilization, the Time Lords then trapped her in an abusive relationship where they controlled her as their pawn: testing her abilities, forcing her to undertake missions for them (a situation which has echoes throughout the Doctor's current lifecycle), and cruelly wiping her memories of her previous lives (much like they did to Jamie and Zoe, or the Doctor to Donna), presumably in an attempt to keep her docile and under their thumb. No wonder the Doctor felt compelled to rebel and flee the planet; who knows how many times the Time Lords had forced them through this cycle of abuse and memory-wiping?

One potential continuity error in this whole narrative comes in Fugitive of the Judoon, when the thirteenth Doctor uncovers what appears to be her TARDIS buried outside the lighthouse. In actual fact, this TARDIS belongs to the Ruth-Doctor; but the Ruth incarnation is far in the Doctor's past, and our Doctor's TARDIS didn't get stuck as a police box until An Unearthly Child, so what gives? Well, I think there's a very easy answer to that question, and I adore it.

1. There's a strong implication that because the Doctor's personality remains consistent despite their memory-wipes, certain elements of their past tend to recur: their chafing against the Time Lords, their flamboyant dress sense, their innate drive to be a force for good, their habit of taking companions, etc.
   
2. Clearly, the Doctor was assigned her own TARDIS while running missions for the Time Lords, which as Ruth she managed to steal.
   
3. At some point, it would appear, Ruth's TARDIS also got stuck in the shape of a 1963 London police box.
   
4. Remember The Doctor's Wife? Idris herself claims (much to the Doctor's confusion), "Do you ever wonder why I chose you all those years ago?"

Naturally, when the first Doctor and Susan prepared to flee Gallifrey, the TARDIS with a helpfully-unlocked door (to which Clara directed them) is the TARDIS that wanted to be stolen, specifically by him. The TARDIS who had already formed a bond with the Doctor over potentially thousands of years and hundreds of prior incarnations, adventuring together under the Time Lords' control, yearning to be free to explore the universe together on their own terms. The TARDIS who was probably just waiting for the right excuse to re-adopt her favorite police box form that they shared once upon a time, which probably explains just why the Doctor has never had any luck in fixing the chameleon circuit. As sweet as the friendship between the Doctor and the TARDIS has always been, I think this adds yet another layer of emotion to their story.

It maintains the integrity of both existing continuity and the Doctor's character.

This, for me, is really the most crucial piece. No matter how fascinating a plot twist is, I'm going to have a hard time swallowing it if it immediately makes me go "But what about...?"

However, nothing that we learn in The Timeless Children rewrites the series' basic mythology. The essential details are still true, from Hartnell's origins as the first Doctor right through to the present day. It's just that there's a lot more backstory to that timeline than we realized. (Likewise, Gallifreyan history remains intact, Rassilon and Omega included. I've seen several reviewers lamenting their exclusion, but the founding of Time Lord society that we witness seems to be far earlier than their time. Rassilon's discovery of time-travel technology is mentioned, but only in passing and not attributed to him by name.)

Part of why this twist works so well is that this knowledge was hidden from the Doctor too. Had she been concealing her true origins all this time, we might have felt a bit betrayed about all the times she'd lied, explicitly or implicitly, about who she was. But if even the Doctor doesn't know that she lived these previous lives, that makes it a lot more interesting. Biologically speaking, the Doctor has always believed that she was a Time Lord, and culturally, Time Lord society is all she's ever known, or at least all that she can remember; so this news is as much of a shock to her as it is to us.

The analogy that works best to me is this: the Doctor's life is like the history of the universe, repeatedly expanding and then collapsing before a new one is born. Every time the Time Lords wiped the Doctor's memory — because I assume they did it to her more than once, though we can only be certain about the most recent instance — was like a Big Crunch, with the following Big Bang launching a new 'cycle' of Doctors, unaware of their prior history. For example, Ruth hails from one of these previous 'universes', one evidently from Gallifrey's post-Minyan days, in which the Division was apparently using the Doctor as an unwilling operative to secretly carry out Time Lord policy throughout the universe. The most recent memory-wipe — presumably after the Doctor ceased to be useful to the Division, and perhaps with the hope that a blank-slate Doctor could be contained, docile, at home — led to the birth of the Hartnell incarnation, who incorrectly believed himself to be the first Doctor. No doubt the Division was most displeased when, despite living an ordinary life on Gallifrey and being schooled at the Academy, the Doctor's familiar old wanderlust and do-gooding urges kicked in again, motivating him to leave the home planet where he never really belonged.

From that point onward, nothing changes. The second Doctor is still, according to the Doctor's own memory, the second Doctor. All of the adventures that she ever had, and the friends she made along the way, are still hers. But a lot of the mysterious clues in her life suddenly make more sense.

It reminds me a bit of a novel I read once (sometime recently, I think?) in which humanity discovered proof that we weren't originally from the Earth; we were an alien species who had wiped out the native population and colonized the planet long before our historical record began. (I can't remember the name of the story offhand, but even if I could, I wouldn't want to say for fear of spoiling the twist!) This twist is similar: everything the Doctor knows about herself is true, except her origins and prehistory.

It honors and celebrates the classic series.

In hindsight, Chibnall was really, really smart to devote series 11 to entirely standalone stories with minimal reliance on series history, because in series 12, he dives in deep. The whole season draws massively on the show's rich back-catalogue, but nowhere is that more overwhelmingly true than in the two-part finale.

It's finally confirmed explicitly, after years of being enshrined in fanon, that the Shobogans (first mentioned in The Deadly Assassin, and long presumed to have been shown in The Invasion of Time) aren't just hoodlums or outcasts, but indigenous Gallifreyans who haven't, for whatever reason, been selected to join the ranks of the Time Lords. The Timeless Children delves deeper into this relationship, clarifying that ordinary Shobogans haven't been bestowed with regenerative capability, and partly explaining how the divide between the native people and their rarefied élite came to be.

In the same vein, we now know where the 12-regeneration limit came from, and why it's not that hard to get around it: because it was a completely arbitrary limit self-imposed by the first Time Lords, in a rare show of power-restraint.

Additionally, we're treated to:

• a reminder about the Cybermen's traditional weakness from Revenge of the Cybermen, when Yaz asks, "Cybermen are allergic to gold, right?" (to which Ravio responds, "I did hear that once.") Yay!
  
• the Master mentions assassinating Presidents with the Doctor in the Panopticon (The Deadly Assassin)
  
• a cavalcade of flashback clips, featuring by my count:
  • all 13 Doctors, plus Martin
    
  • 10 former companions (Bill, Clara, Amy, River, Donna, Martha, Jack, Rose, and Sarah)
    
  • 8 Masters (Dhawan, Gomez, Simm, Jacobi, Roberts, Ainley, Pratt, and Delgado)
    
  • 6 villains (Davros, Sil, Sharaz Jek, Scaroth, Morbius, and Sutekh)
    
  • 15 monsters (Daleks, Cybermen, scarecrows, Racnoss, cat-nuns, Sycorax, Ood, Slitheen, haemovores YAY, Voc robots, Zygons, two Sontarans, Sea Devils, Ogrons, and Autons)
    
  • along with a string of clips from each of the thirteenth Doctor's adventures
• and whole chunks of the episode are set inside the Matrix, the Doctor's first visit there since The Ultimate Foe. (As she points out: "I've fought the Matrix before, denied its reality. I can do it again!") The Master has tried to hijack its secrets before, too, also during The Trial of a Time Lord.

It widens the scope of the Doctor Who universe.

For one thing, just think about the vast array of potential stories that this now opens up for the series to tell. Who knows what friends and enemies the Doctor might have made during those years, and what might happen if she encountered them again with no memory of what happened before? (The eighth Doctor novels experimented with this idea too, but we have yet to see anything comparable in the televised canon.)

It also throws the door wide open as far as who can play the Doctor in future. That wasn't really in question after Jo Martin anyway, but now there's ample evidence that the Doctor can take absolutely whatever body they please, unconstrained by gender or ethnicity or anything else. I can just picture Chibnall chuckling to himself, "Unsavoury parts of fandom still have a hard time with one female Doctor? Well, here, have 4 more of them, plus 5 more ethnic-minority Doctors." Can't really argue against it now!

It officially gives the show an unlimited lifespan.

Remember the years between 1976 and 2013, when we all wondered what on earth the TV series would do once the Doctor inevitably ran out of regenerations? Sure, we got an answer in The Time of the Doctor, and a potentially unlimited new regeneration cycle (or so the Time Lords wanted him to think!), but now there's no question about it: the Doctor is functionally immortal. I hope this won't prove to be a burden on her soul — if it were me, I think I'd find the knowledge to be crushing — but so far, she seems to have adapted to this discovery with impressive ease!

And it means that, finally, there's no 'official' end date hanging over the Doctor's head. She can exist forever, and so can her adventures on or off our television screens. We never again need to come up with a reason why the Time Lords have given the Doctor yet another mysteriously-magicked-up cycle of regenerations. What a lovely gift from Chris Chibnall.

General questions remaining? Well:

1. Is the Division the same as the CIA? (Or is it a precursor?)

2. The head of the Division basically states outright that they're putting the Timeless Child through a series of tests, of which her Brendan life may be one; but why, and what are they testing for? (Suitability to be a Division operative?)

3. More specifically, why does the Division send an incarnation of the Timeless Child to Ireland? What was he meant to learn, or accomplish, there? And why are his memories wiped after this particular escapade? Are we meant to assume that the sergeant was actually the Division head, and Patrick was Tecteun, in disguise? Or were these scenes meant to be a metaphorical representation of how the Division exploited the Child, packaged into easily-digestible and -interpretable format by Tecteun when she secreted this immersive clue in the Matrix? Or or is the Master right that these memories are nothing more than a clue for the Doctor to decode?

4. Do the redacted portions of the Matrix still exist as memories locked deep within the Doctor's mind? If so, will she ever regain her memory of the decades, centuries, millennia that the Time Lords erased? Or will it become a new mission in her life, to poke at those memory gaps and try to reconstruct what happened? This could become a very interesting recurring thread.

5. What is the Doctor's true (birth) name, and true Gallifreyan name, the one she's been hiding for all these years as a massive secret (from everyone but River)?

6. How does Susan figure into all this? Her hotly-debated origins are still unknown.

Amazingly, I've only been able to think of a few potential new continuity problems that are introduced by this development:

1. How does the Doctor's alien nature square with the fact that their biology matches Time Lord biology?

2. Likewise, how does their alien nature square with that claim of half-human heritage? (I have no problem finally writing that one off FYI.)

3. Why, in all this time, has the Doctor never before encountered any of her pre-Hartnell incarnations? (...or hasn't she? Some might make the case for Goronwy from Delta and the Bannermen, Merlin from Battlefield, and the Curator from Time of the Doctor.)

Clearly, none of these present insurmountable problems. The first question is the only one that I can't immediately figure out a plausible answer for, but given how many alien species seem to have human-like bodies, perhaps it's not such a stretch that there are a lot of alien species with dual cardiovascular systems. (Or possibly the Shobogans overhauled their biology when they absorbed the child's regenerative ability; it might even have been a necessary modification to survive periodic complete cellular rewrites. Which, really, is making the Shobogans sound a bit like Krillitanes. Any relation?)

So, really, Chris Chibnall, massive credit to you for a pretty spectacular writing job. Looking back over the history of Doctor Who season finales, there haven't been many that really impressed me, and certainly none to this degree. As I suspected, this has been by far the most interesting season arc since the revival started, and I feel sure the repercussions will continue to be felt and explored in future seasons, which makes me as happy as a giant clam munching on Harry Sullivan's foot. Allow me to enumerate two things that particularly impressed me:

1. As might be evident from my comments above, there seem to be very few noteworthy plot holes, and even fewer that present genuine script problems. There are a few issues particular to this story which stuck in my craw, which I'll get into in the 'minor points' section below, but I have no serious problems with the revised series continuity, which is especially impressive when you consider what a massive undertaking this story must have been.

2. On several occasions as I watched the story for the first time, an objection would occur to me, serious enough to actually dent my enjoyment, and without fail, within minutes, the episode would immediately address it. (At one point, the script headed off an objection that I hadn't even thought of yet!) A perfect example is Ashad's declaration that he planned for the Cybermen to ascend beyond organic components, to which the Master swiftly replies, having apparently read my mind: "Oh. You mean, robots. You'll be robots. [...] Ucch. I'm a bit disappointed. I see how you got there, an AI wanting to create more things in its own image, but it lacks vision. Right, what if we, erm, workshop this. You know, kick it around a little bit. I have notes. [...] I mean, it's good! But it's not great. There's loads of robots. Throw a stick in this universe, you'll hit a robot. I used to do that. Any idiot can make themselves into a robot. It's not special."

This story is a massive turning point for the Doctor, so yet again, Jodie Whittaker is given a range of material to sink her teeth into. Her typically sunny mood at the story's start turns rapidly stormy in the aftermath of the Cybermen's attack, her frustration spilling over when her defenses are rendered useless to save the refugees. Her emotions are so on edge throughout the story that the Doctor is a bit more short-tempered than usual, and we've never seen her as furious as when she yells at the Master to "Show me the rest!" So it's no surprise that Doctor Blunt rears her head again ("Don't need your life story!"). I also liked her unamused "What?" to the Master, and the desperation in her voice when the Doctor yells "Fam! Down!" which heightens the tension of that scene. All of her confrontations with the Master are superb; the first few are characterized by combative anger, but their final argument ends on a hopeful note, as the Doctor emerges unbowed ("I am so much more than you"). And she has some nice lighthearted moments to balance out her darker moods, like her pleading "What I'd give for a friendly voice right now. Go on, please?"

There are, however, two moments that I find questionable. First: at the end of part one, the Doctor has just learned that Yaz and Graham are moments away from death, but she literally doesn't even raise a finger to help. She doesn't even give them any reassuring words before vanishing through the Boundary with the Master; she just ignores them! (Thankfully, the Master does confirm at the start of the next episode that she's secretly trying to figure out a way to rescue them, but her response in the moment still feels a bit callous.) Second: I confess that the very end leaves a slightly bitter taste in my mouth. In general, I'd have been much happier if she'd stuck firmly to her ethics and figured out a way to stop the Cybermen that didn't involve murdering the Master in cold blood (no matter how much he deserves it), though since she had originally intended her plan to be self-sacrificial, and since she seems to be unable to follow through, I can let that part slide. But I'm just not sure I'm totally comfortable with the Doctor leaving Ko Sharmus to die in her stead, much less with how readily she abandons him to his fate. His rationale is perfectly logical, but I'm not sure the Doctor should be willing to accept it.

But her brief interactions with Doctor Ruth are a real highlight. What a lovely surprise (even if we were all half-expecting it) to see Jo Martin again! Here, the Ruth-Doctor serves as our Doctor's cheerleader, reminding her (and reassuring the audience) that no matter how much appears to have changed, she's still the same person as always. This affirming exchange had me sobbing with joy:

thirteenth Doctor: "All this? It means I'm not who I thought I was."
Ruth-Doctor: "Because your memories aren't compatible with what you've learned today?"
thirteenth Doctor: "Yes."
Ruth-Doctor: "Have you ever been limited by who you were before?"

I just adore that, even after having the rug pulled out from under her, the Doctor emerges from this week's adventure not saddled with an emotional crisis, but revitalized with a renewed sense of self. From this most chipper of Doctors, such a positive outlook seems only fitting.

To my enormous shock, the story ends with our companion trio intact: Ryan, Graham, and Yaz all live again to fight another day. (Though we now know that this TARDIS crew will only last until the holiday special, in which both Ryan and Graham will be departing, thus proving my instincts ultimately correct.) Happily, The Timeless Children also makes really good use of all three characters across both episodes. Delightfully, they also become members of the exclusive club of companions who've gotten to visit Gallifrey, and aside from Clara, the only new-series companions to do so. (Though they did not, as I had hoped, draw any parallels between the Doctor's ruined home planet and the future Earth from Orphan 55. At least, not yet; it might yet come up when they're reunited. They didn't exactly have a lot of time for heart-to-heart therapy chats this week. Nor do they follow up on the Doctor's hint about Bill's fate, nor does Jack return. I'm not doing very well at all with my predictions this week, am I?)

Despite now hewing to the Doctor's pacifistic mores, Ryan is, for once, forced to take up weapons, when he's finally given a real gun with which to defend their little party against an invading Cyber-platoon. This gives him an opportunity to put his gaming skills to use again, and he acquits himself pretty well, at least in terms of bravery, if not marksmanship. (He only actually shoots one Cyberman, at point-blank range.) Though his basketball skills do finally come through ("Swish!") when he aims a bomb right into the middle of the Cyber-troops. Even if it was just a lucky shot, his unexpected accuracy couldn't have been better timed! This leads to another great scene of Tosin-Cole-brand comedy, when Ryan celebrates his victory ("We defeated the Cybermen! Well, me. Technically, it's me.") before getting fired upon from behind ("Ooh!"). I was also delighted that he gets another "oh, my days!"

Despite his natural inclination to worry, Graham really steps up to the plate this week, staying positive in the face of dire circumstances, and brainstorming with the best of them. He and Yaz make a great team, supporting one another and encouraging everyone else. It's Graham's idea to shut down life support on the refugee ship, and he comes up with the idea to disguise themselves as Cybermen, thus saving all their lives twice over.

Yaz cements her characterization as the companion who's best learned to emulate the Doctor. Here, she's fearless (one of her best moments in this regard is when Graham asks "Step into the unknown? Who fancies going first?" and by the time he's done, Yaz is already halfway there) and — my favorite part — irrepressibly optimistic. In Yaz' eyes, there's no obstacle they can't overcome, and no threat they can't defeat. "Me and you, together?" she smiles at Graham, when all seems lost: "No-one else stands a chance." Amazingly, her power of positive thinking actually yields results, even when all the cards are stacked against them, simply because she doesn't give up (well, and Chibnall allows them to have a great deal of luck). But this moment still gave me a good laugh, because gosh, seriously, who behaves this way:

Ravio: "We cannot take Cybermen to the Boundary."
Yaz: "What are our other options? Surrender this ship? Land on another planet and let the Cybermen loose there? We're gonna keep all of you safe. We're gonna find the Doctor, and we're gonna take them Cybermen down. Aren't we, Graham?"
Graham: "...Yes, we are, Yaz. Totally. Very much so."
Yedlarmi: "That's some high-level self-delusion."

Rather hilariously, Yaz then gets this same can-do spirit turned back against her:

Graham: "I've been thinking about that. I've got an idea. It's a bit of a mad one, quite dangerous, and it might not work, but... we've got form with plans like that, haven't we, Yaz?"
Yaz: (momentary hesitation) "Yeah. Our speciality. ...how dangerous?"

I'm also over the moon that Ascension of the Cybermen finally gives us the scene for which I've been begging for two years: a proper heart-to-heart between Yaz and Graham. And it's not just their sweet "You've come a long way, Graham O'Brien" exchange, which made me happy enough, but a full-on conversation, while they (astonishingly and extremely unwisely) leave all the hard and time-sensitive labor of dismantling four Cybermen to the others. But who cares! They're having a proper chat!!! It's exactly what I've been craving between the two of them, and it even gives Yaz some character development. (Graham's reaction here echoes exactly what I was thinking, and exactly what I always think whenever anyone says something like this, on TV and in real life. Yaz' response, I must credit, is pitch-perfect.)

Yaz: "You're not such a bad human yourself, either."
Graham: "...Not su– is that it?! I've just said all them lovely things about you, and all you give me is 'you're not such a bad human'?!"
Yaz: "Mate, I'm from Yorkshire. That's a love letter."

And I love Gill's frantic delivery of "Graham, where's Ryan?!"

So we still don't have any clarity on the Master's timeline, but Ascension of the Cybermen is a great showcase for Dhawan's volcanic, unhinged incarnation. I loved his oh-so-light delivery of "All gone now.", the look on the Master's face when he says "The child is you.", Dhawan's always-entertaining 'hot potato' acting as the Cyberium merges with the Master, his frenzied "Shoot him!!!" and "For the end of the universe itself!", and this fantastic line: "Promise I'll roll out the red carpet." (to the Doctor) "It's red because it's drenched in the blood of our people!"

Head-villain-turned-second-fiddle Ashad (Patrick O'Kane) is back, though in this story, he's reduced to chasing after the Doctor and her companions from a distance, which doesn't give him as many opportunities to demonstrate his bloodthirsty side. Still, he earns this chilling description from Ravio: "We're carrying a Cyberman that makes other Cybermen scream!" Yeesh. Alas, he's also written out without the Doctor's knowledge, in shockingly sudden fashion. As Heidi Klum would say: one minute you're in, the next you're miniaturized. It's quite an ignoble end for our Mini-Bad (turned mini-Bad).

But his army of Cybermen are definitely praise-worthy. I love the new design, which hearks back to classic Cybermen of the Revenge era, particularly the helmet style. The Cyber-head drones are an interesting addition to their ranks, clever in concept and strategically very useful as they immediately wipe out the refugee camp's defenses. And the Cyber Time-Lord costumes are just amazing, especially the filigree metal headdresses.

This story introduces us to Tecteun (Seylan Baxter), the Doctor's adopted mother. She doesn't get any dialogue of her own, so we don't exactly get to know her, but she's nevertheless an extremely interesting character, and I love her Amelia-Earhart-style explorer's costume.

The isolated human colony initially boasts a cast-swelling 7 members, but those numbers are swiftly whittled down by the Cyber-attack. First to go are the two non-speaking characters, Fuskle (Jack Osborn, who delivers a convincing performance as a deeply shy and possibly autistic young man) and Solpado (Kirsty Besterman, who gets next to no screen time). To my surprise, they're rapidly joined by Feekat (Steve Toussaint), an amiable ex-teacher who appears to be the colony's de facto leader and therefore our most likely lead character. His death, retribution by Ashad for attempting to conceal himself and Ethan, came as a shock.

That leaves 4 characters to accompany the TARDIS crew for most of the story's remainder, three of whom flee in the shuttle with Yaz and Graham. In Feekat's absence, gruff Ravio (Julie Graham) takes the lead. Like Feekat, Ravio seems like an innately diplomatic person, but she's also effortlessly commanding, which stands her in good stead when she's surrounded by hostile forces, deadly situations, and bickering crew. I also detected a hint of flirtation between her and Graham, which briefly made me wonder if perhaps Graham was destined to be the first new-series companion to depart the TARDIS in order to marry someone he'd only just met. Wouldn't that have made a funny change!

As gruff Yedlarmi, Alex Austin gives a great performance, simultaneously reassuring and infantilizing his meek little brother Fuskle (Jack Osborn). Fuskle's death sends him into a bitter, resentful emotional tailspin. He remains the most hot-headed, pessimistic member of the group, though it doesn't stop him from wholeheartedly pitching in to help.

With slightly less screentime is Bescot (Rhiannon Clements), the least jaded member of the refugee party; she's definitely the Yaz of their group. Alas, she barely gets anything to do before she's shot dead while covering the rest of the group so they can escape from the Cybermen.

Accompanying the Doctor and Ryan is Ethan (Matt Carver), who doesn't get a great deal of characterization aside from "smart young man who has never known a time without the Cyber-war". Fortunately, this one character detail gives him some nice moments, including a sad glimpse at what life must have been like as a member of a widely-shunned community (because everywhere that humans fled, the Cybermen would pursue them), and the revelation that he grew up knowing how to hotwire a Cyber-shuttle, which gives him a useful plot function once he's stranded with the Doctor and Ryan.

As Ko Sharmus, Ian McElhinney exudes wisdom and kindness, along with a hint of world-weariness which is entirely to be expected from a man who's been stuck on his own for decades, forever escorting other people to safety but never getting to enjoy that safety himself. Tragically, this state of affairs continues right through to his death, when he gives his own life so that the Doctor can live, without even realizing the magnitude of that sacrifice. I enjoyed McElhinney's delivery of "And then, 'cause I'm an idiot, I felt like it was my duty to wait, in case others came. Hmph."

My stress level during Ascension of the Cybermen was so very high that I was incredibly grateful for the sweet, tranquil, mysterious little interludes in 1950s Ireland. (Wouldn't this be a nice setting for a full story someday?) The most central character in these scenes is Brendan (Evan McCabe), ultimately revealed to be another previous incarnation of the Doctor (or possibly an amalgam of the Doctor's previous incarnations). If indeed he was the Doctor, once upon a time, it finally proves that, yes, the Doctor has been ginger, she just doesn't yet remember it! McCabe's performance is subdued but nice; Brendan comes across as just an ordinary lad living a perfectly ordinary life, perhaps a bit sheltered but relatively content.

In the Ireland scenes, I must give special commendation to Orla O'Rourke as Brendan's doting mother Meg, who emotes heavily with her eyes alone: witness the look on her face as she silently pleads with her husband to agree to keep the baby, and the way they radiate the warmth she feels for the child. Brendan's father, Patrick, is well played by Branwell Donaghey, as a well-meaning man who's deeply attached to his only child. Coalyn Byrne is great as the kindly, protective Sergeant, and Andrew Macklin gets a strong scene as desperate thief Michael.

It's impressive, isn't it, the impact that incidental music can have on TV and film? During the COVID-19 lockdown, while I've been procrastinating on finishing this review (mostly by sleeping), I've binge-watched a few shows, notably Inside No. 9. The last time I binged it, with Gray in 2015, only the first two seasons were out, and I wasn't even aware until recently that more had been released. So it was high on my list for catching up, and one thing that's occurred to me while watching — along with how infallibly entertaining and top-notch it is, in both scripting and performances — is that Christian Henson's music is just superb. It catches the viewer's attention without distracting from the onscreen drama, the style always enhances the episode's idiosyncratic mood, and it contains sequences that are gorgeous in their own right. In the most recent episode of season 5, "The Stakeout", I even found myself realizing in hindsight that the violin score itself had been a subtle clue. I bring this up because it's driven home what a stark contrast there is between the music from Inside No. 9 and the music from Doctor Who, which typically thrums away quietly in the background, barely drawing any attention to itself at all. This week, Akinola composes a gorgeous, heartfelt score for the Ireland scenes, but the music is barely noticeable in the rest of the story.

Again this week, I'm full of praise for the sets. The refugee ship might be my favorite; the camera makes great use of the interesting angles provided by its unusual design, with a row of tilted windows at the top of the set, and a metal scaffold of freely-rotating seats, which give the set a huge boost of kinetic energy as they twirl around the central engine core. The Cyber war carrier also looks wonderful, particularly the pod-bay with its unusual zipper-design doors. The combination of sets, effects, and dialogue do an excellent job of suggesting the vast scale of the ship. (Though the design of the troop bay is a bit weird; the pods are spaced really far apart, and one row is aligned under the ceiling overhang but the other isn't, which suggests a less efficient use of space than one would expect from Cybermen.) And I was thrilled by the purple lighting of the Doctor's temporary new TARDIS.

The story's filming locations are likewise gorgeous, with the possible exception of the practically-abandoned settlement, which (with the effects team's help) is given a truly desolate appearance. Ireland is a particular treat, with its green fields, drystone walls, thatched cottages, and grand stone buildings, not to mention the dramatic cliffs of Nash Point (which also doubles for the peaceful seaside vistas of the Boundary planet).

One of my favorite effects this week is the shimmering rings of the paralysis field, the edges of which undulate like you'd expect from streams of energy. It's very subtle, but effective, and reminds me of the way that the humans' gravraft engine (and other energy conduits throughout the last couple of seasons, notably in The Tsuranga Conundrum) seem almost fluid, rather than just steadily glowing. The Boundary, too, is a gorgeous effect of electric purple light, as is the brilliant blue explosion of the Cyber war carrier. Among the less-dramatic effects, the Cyber army awakening is well done, there's a great shot of the Master's fingers covered in dark dripping goo after he picks up Ashad's body, and I really like the metal-on-metal sound when mini-Ashad is put down on the metal floor. The Cyber drones look fine as they zip through the skies shooting at people, but they're not exactly the most convincing effect, so I think the production team were wise to mainly stick to the drones' POV as they pursue the refugees and target their defenses.

And I gotta give props yet again to my alien script designers, whoever you are. Y'all are hitting it out of the park this season. This week, we have a nice curvy Arabic-style alien script on the Cyber-monitors.

As before, I continue to really enjoy Jamie Magnus Stone's direction. He starts the story off with a creative incorporation of the title credits, whirling around the eye-socket of a severed Cyber-head as it slowly floats through space toward the camera. One of my favorite moments in the entire story is the dramatic shot of the camera following Brendan as he falls backwards off the cliff, later reflected — with deliberate thematic intent — in the identical shot of the Timeless Child falling off a similar cliff on Gallifrey. His wide-angle shots of the story's scenic locations are another highlight, and his talent for kinetic shots continues. I was particularly impressed by those set within the Matrix, as characters seem to float through the void (like the thirteenth Doctor hovering around Ruth). Magnus Stone also includes a great cut from Meg's line "If it gets worse, I'll call the doctor" to the Doctor cresting a hill.

This review took me a bit longer to finish than usual because I wound up taking a trip to Turkey at the end of February, satisfying a long-held desire to visit Cappadocia. Thank goodness the timing of the season worked out just right that I didn't have to scramble to finish this review during my trip; the season finale aired on my second night in Göreme, where I watched it late at night in a cave suite with sand periodically trickling down from the ceiling! Very atmospheric. (Then, of course, we had the pandemic. I'm hoping that one silver lining of this COVID-19 lockdown will be my ability to finally power through some more classic-series reviews once I've caught up on this one.)

Minor points:

• Oh yes, please, let's start out this tense story with a joke! (I LOLed so hard at this one that I had to rewind!)

  Yaz: "What's wrong, Graham? Can't take the commando lifestyle?"
  Ryan: "Hey! No commando jokes, please. I don't need that image in me head."

• Dubious Plot Element #1: This seems like a rather important plot hole to me. If the humans' escape craft is damaged, and they don't have the spare parts to fix it, then how does it wind up taking off just fine?

• Didn't I warn you about this last week, Doctor? I don't want to name names, but I think someone wasn't paying attention to me.

  Doctor: "I've been so reckless with you."
  Yaz: "What're you talking about?"
  Doctor: "You're human! If they capture you, they'll convert you."

• Ethan, cowering from Ashad who has just entered an abandoned building with the intent of killing any humans he finds, feels the need to start talking to Feekat, and not in a quiet voice either! What on earth possesses him to do this?! (It does, after all, lead directly to Feekat's death.)

• Dubious Plot Element #2: The pursuit force is comprised of a mere three Cybermen (including Ashad), plus a handful of drone-heads, so why did they need to bring two shuttles?

• I really have to compliment the dialogue this week. Every time it seems to be veering into schmaltzy or unrealistic territory, Chibnall lobs in a down-to-earth riposte that turns it from pretentious to funny, yet without sapping the genuine emotion of the moment. I'm impressed. Here's a great example, after the Doctor triumphantly "destroys" Ashad (to quote all those political video memes on Facebook) with an impassioned bit of psychoanalysis, only for him to respond:

  Ashad: "Yes. You are correct."
  Doctor: (thrown) "Oh. Am I? Didn't expect you to take it that well. Have to bill you for therapy at this rate."

• Dubious Plot Element #3: In this whole story, one of the most unbelievable plot elements, in my opinion, is that Michael just happened to be hanging around at the bottom of the cliff (?!?) when Brendan fell off. What on earth was he doing down there, hunting for seashells while in uniform?

• Why doesn't Brendan regenerate? Is it because this isn't a literal incident from one of the Doctor's previous lives?

• Dubious Plot Element #4: the miraculous salvation of the ship, when it manages to fling itself with one last burst of power onto the Cyber-carrier. The only problem I have is that the propulsion is completely uncontrolled; nobody's steering the ship, and yet it just happens to be aimed in exactly the right direction to fly straight into the docking bay when they activate the engines. Had they just shown Ravio steering it somehow, or even waiting until the ship was perfectly aligned with the bay door before hitting the power, I could've bought this with no problem. (Well, less of a problem, anyway.) But I appreciate that Yaz and Graham still remember their deep-space survival lesson from The Woman Who Fell to Earth.

• How does the Cyber-carrier still have oxygen? (Was it activated by the automation sensors when the refugees' ship boarded?)

• "Ko Sharmus?" gapes the Doctor. "You're a person, not a planet?" Well, I'm glad she said it, because I was thinking the same thing.

• You tell her, Graham!

  Ravio: "Oh, it's so cold in here."
  Graham: "Ah, see? That is 'cause you're alive and breathing. Because of us."
  Ravio: "Are you gonna keep going on about that?"
  Graham: "Yes, every hour, on the hour."

• I really love Graham's sense of humor! It's always a highlight.

  Graham: "Level one hundred and thirty-nine. That's always been my favorite level."

• Is this what you humans call flirting? (Also, Walsh's delivery is predictably wonderful.)

  Graham: "Right. Let's have a butcher's."
  (Ravio looks at him, confused.)
  Graham: "Butcher's hook, look? It's Cockney rhyming sla– ...no, don't worry about it."
  Ravio: "You are really strange."
  Graham: "Excuse me? I'm the, I'm the most normal bloke you're ever gonna meet!"
  Ravio: "No, strange is a compliment. I like strange."
  Graham: "Eh? ...oh."

• I wonder why the Cybermen have never attacked the Boundary before? Surely they must have been able to figure out generally where it was, given all the human ships headed that way (and their presumably-trackable transmissions).

• Why does the Boundary remain open, and tuned to Gallifrey, even when nobody is standing near it? Is the Cyber war carrier sufficient to keep it activated? (And why, when it reopens for the TARDIS crew, does it connect them to Gallifrey again? We're told that it never links to the same destination twice.)

• Given that Ashad has now awoken his new army and pressed them into service, our heroes are lucky that there are still some Cybermen dormant in their pods! (I guess Ashad only revived enough to send down to the Boundary planet, and left the rest in stasis for later.)

• I can't believe the Master is actually daring to call them "Cybs". Has he been reading the Leekley bible or something?!

• Dubious Plot Element #5: that Ravio and Yedlarmi are able to disassemble four Cybermen, and somehow dispose of the undoubtedly-gruesome mutilated (and quite possibly still living) bodies, without leaving behind a single noticeable tell-tale sign, in a matter of minutes. Fortunately the Cyber-carrier does eventually raise an alarm that the dormant Cybermen are being tampered with; I would've been really skeptical if their vandalism hadn't triggered some kind of alert. Though why Ashad can't see exactly what they're doing, and how they're all able to seal themselves up inside the Cyber-suits so quickly to evade detection, still beggars belief. (I know! Maybe Cyber-armor is equipped with convenient latches, which the occupant could use to step in and out of it at will! Assuming of course that they still had all their limbs, they weren't wired directly into the suit, and the armor's life-support systems weren't the only thing keeping them alive.) For that matter, it must be a huge risk putting on a Cyber-suit, which is quite likely to be pre-loaded with conversion nanites and/or an intelligent wiring interface.

• "My new Cyber-warriors," boasts Ashad, "are purged of organic components!" (Is that what he was doing to them in the pod bay?) Soooo that means the Death Particle didn't kill them off, right? Then again, I suppose the explosion did.

• When a Cyberman pulls the lid off the crate in which Ethan is hiding, why does Ethan just cower there, instead of firing the gun that he's clutching?

• Twenty-four Cybermen transmat down to the planet's surface, and 17 are killed (2 by Ko Sharma's automated blaster, up to 10 more by Ryan's bomb, 1 by Ko Sharma, 1 by Ryan, and 3 by Yaz and Graham)... so what happens to the remaining 7?

• Dubious Plot Element #6: I must admit that if the Matrix is the repository of all Time Lord knowledge, I don't quite see why reliving all these former memories is going to wind it up in knots (surely it's already catalogued all of them?), but it's still a delightful sequence. (Maybe the Matrix just can't process all that input at once?)

• If the Doctor is concerned about being able to detonate the Death Particle, why not leave Ashad's remains on the Cyber-carrier, hidden behind one of the bombs? (Then again, since they accidentally go off early, it's probably just as well she didn't think of that solution!)

• I love the noises that the bombs make when they're affixed to the walls. Part of the sound effect reminds me of Robots of Death, when the Doctor and Leela's cuffs are sealed and unsealed.

• It must be said that in this story, the Cybermen are Stormtrooper-level terrible shots. They shoot at least 25 times at the humans, but never even manage so much as to graze one.

• Dubious Plot Element #7: who creates an explosive that can only be detonated by hand? (And if the Doctor knew she required an explosive in order for her plan to work, why didn't she instruct them to set one aside for her, rather than hoping they wouldn't deploy them all?)

• It is, of course, just possible that despite Ko Sharmus' self-sacrifice, the Master and his Cybermen managed to escape. (Well, certainly the Master did! We know we haven't seen the last of him.)

• Dubious Plot Element #8: I'm not sure I totally buy the Judoon beaming straight into the TARDIS, but maybe the Doctor just hadn't re-engaged the safety protocols yet.

• Yay! After we narrowly missed "Resolution of the Daleks", now we do get "Revolution of the Daleks"! Hooray, return of the 1980s-style titles!

Overall, it's a masterstroke. Looking over other reviews, I seem to be one of the few people who thoroughly enjoyed The Timeless Children, which is a shame. For all the story's faults, the highlights, I think, are really worth celebrating, and I'm excited to see how the series leverages this new backstory going forward. For me, the expansion of Doctor Who lore, explicitly involving the Doctor with ancient Gallifrey, is a home run.