I love a good time-hopping adventure. It makes this world of time-travelers feel alive and it makes Time Lords feel powerful. Here are the Doctor and the Master jumping through time (or living through stretches of it) to catch up with each other and continue the fight. It would be terrifying to be a mortal in this world. Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan are great additions. A real strength of this era is that it brought us to corners of history the franchise had ignored until then.

It's wild that we got a Winston Churchill audio boxset before meeting Noor, but Doctor Who is finally righting that. It's great to see, and if you're going to grab two people from different points in time, these two (the first programmer and an anti-fascist spy) feel especially on theme for an adventure about a modern-day tech company and its connection with a scheme to kill the world's spies. That said, I would have liked the writing and plot to do a little more with this. I feel like a stronger show would have woven their personal stories throughout the episode, giving them time to be proper fleshed-out characters who help save the day with their unique skills and outlooks. They help the Doctor, to be sure, but the episode would have been stronger if it had leaned in.

Now, for a few issues.

Yaz and Ryan are not handled well in these episodes, but they seldom are. I just never feel like they are going anywhere or doing anything interesting. They are simply not given enough to do and yet they are always around. If 13 was going to travel with three companions, the show should have done a better job of really making each episode focus on one of them. Maybe one of them really goes through some intense growth while the other two have a comic relief-y B-plot. Give us an episode where Yaz goes 80% and Ryan and Graham share a 20% on some light hijinks. Then switch it up. Instead we get everyone at 33% and nothing ever feels meaty enough. In Spyfall, Yaz was seemingly traumatized by her trip to the Kassavin realm. This is resolved by Ryan saying he'll protect her. What? That's not the issue. And why doesn't 13 seem to care? 13 should care. 13 is her girlfriend.

Reintroducing the Master was a choice. I totally think it's fine to bring the Master back, and they cast a wonderful actor to take on the role, but it was way too soon. Yes, the Master is constantly killed and brought back. But never before have we seen a Master redemption arc like we had with Missy. That should have sat untouched for a while and only brought off the shelf with good purpose.

Destroying Gallifrey AGAIN was an even bigger choice. We start NuWho with Gallifrey extinct and that gives the first few New Doctors a distinct flavor. Then we find out it actually wasn't destroyed. Woah. But then, the Doctor has to find it and after two seasons, he does. He doesn't really mess with Gallifrey or the Time Lords again until he regenerates but it doesn't feel like a glaring omission. He hates them and he's got other things to do. And then, with no further adventures on Gallifrey, we destroy it again. Because the Master was mad? Because he was lied to? The way everyone else was lied to? About something that's just kind of interesting in the same sci-fi way everything else is?

Why didn't we at least get a season (or a few) of Gallifrey being a threat or annoyance to the Doctor? I'd love to see our hero Time Lord chafe against a tyrannical, feudal time empire. How much more interesting would the Timeless Child arc be if it played out against this backdrop? The Time Lords are manipulating the Doctor all while lying about who she is. That would be great. That would feel like a story.