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TARDIS Guide

Review of The Ultimate Foe by leahhh

9 July 2025

This review contains spoilers!

I enjoyed the Fantasy Factory sequences - "the very junior Mr Popplewick is not permitted to expect anyone". It feels right for the repository of all Time Lord knowledge to contain an endless series of stuffy little offices occupied by stuffy little English bureaucrats.

The Valeyard reveal plays pretty well, Michael Jayston's performance almost makes me wish this episode were longer so he'd have more time to play the openly evil version of the character. The confrontation on the beach was great, and I love the self-loathing thing they have going on. "Like all megalomaniacs, he is consumed with his own vanity." Adding the Master only makes it more fun. It's the world's most passionate hate triangle and there's only two people in it.

Love how the Master hacks into the courtroom screen and they can't get him to leave.

The whole episode feels like it's leading towards Six dying in a blaze of glory, right up until he doesn't. Frankly it's weird. Instead we get some of the most content-free technobabble the show's ever put out, and "carrot juice". Ah well.


leahhh

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