MR 070: Unregenerate!

Or the one where Sylvester McCoy chews the scenery for an hour. There's definitely some interesting stuff going on, but this one is kind of hampered by its format. It could have benefited from being an hour long story instead of a two hour story.

There's a mysterious organization that is abducting people outside of time a day before their death. They make a faustian deal with them to make their lives better in exchange for grabbing them at the last minute.

The Doctor is in this facility having just recently regenerated. He lost his mind and is a gibberish wreck for some reason while Mel is off on a chase with a cabbie that the Doctor directed her towards.

This facility is abducting people to wipe their mind and put in an artificial mind for the purpose of controlling time travel. They can direct the course of time travel research by controlling the minds of those who are time sensitive.

I was thinking that this was something the time lords might do and it turns out they are indeed time lords. It's interesting how the episode tries to disguise them being time lords and use it as a cliffhanger for the last episode. It recontexualizes what's going on. It's very Rassilonian to interfere in the development of another species for your own benefit. They don't want a bunch of other species to have time travel and mess up their precious web of time. The thing that allows them to be dominant in the universe. They see it as a noble purpose but of course they do. They're brainwashed.

And hypocritical. When the show is not doing the changing history is bad/fixed points in time bit that I hate so much, the Doctor regularly changes history and interferes all the time. That's why the Time Lords put him on trial twice, as Mel helpfully points out.

Of course this is not new ground for the CIA. They're the ones who go against traditional time lord rules to preserve time lord supremacy. To actually maintain those rules they have to break them. Cause they're not good rules in the first place.

I like that they first tried this on Daleks and it didn't work. Kind of a precursor to the time War. They knew the Daleks were a threat, clearly with Genesis.

With the recontexualization that these are time lords, we also get that these are not just generic ai, they're mini-tardis intelligences. They're growing tardis intelligence on a computer essentially instead of however tardises are normally grown. The only problem is that a tardis intelligence is way more than a human or time lord brain can contain so it's not a very effective process.

The two newly born tardises commune with the Doctor's tardis to figure out how to make the facility into a tardis themselves and then leave while the Doctor dismantles the program. I do like that one of the characters is a CIA agent and calls them, but it doesn't really matter. I'm not sure why the human cabbie stays but sure I guess.

Like I said, a lot of interesting ideas, but they're mostly in the backhalf after a bloated first half. Condense it down to an hour and this could have been much better. Still it's decent for what it is. If you ignore McCoy's cheese.