We have the two-part finale to Series 10 and for a long time, at least up until 2023, the last excellent episode of Doctor Who. But even with the few great episodes we’ve had since Russell took over, none have managed to top this episode. Of course, this had a lot of buzz going in with the promotional images of the original Cybermen and the return of John Simm as the Master, all signs seemed to indicate this was going to be another overblown series finale as we’d become accustomed to at this point and yet surprisingly this ended up way better than it had any right to be.

It starts off giving these by-the-numbers Moffat vibes with a lot of hockey dialogue and Missy being her usual over the top self as she’s put to the test by the Doctor in his efforts to rehabilitate her. But suddenly the tone of the episode seems to snap when it all goes wrong with Bill paying the price and what follows is one of the heaviest and most unforgiving ordeals any companion of the Doctor has ever gone through. I love the setting Moffat creates in this story, having a massive spaceship on the edge of a black hole where time moves slower on one end than it does for the other, resulting in a scenario where the Doctor, Missy and Nardole spend only a couple minutes at their end of the ship coming to grips with the situation while Bill is forced to spend years at her end where a society has grown over the decades but the population is dwindling.  And when humanity is desperate to survive by any means necessary when the world is falling apart, sometimes that involves discarding everything that made them who they are for a life as an unfeeling machine.

Now I should make it very clear, World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls doesn’t contradict the events of Spare Parts, where the Fifth Doctor lands on the planet Mondas at the birth of the Cybermen. The story makes it clear that the Cybermen are an unfortunate result of humanity’s future no matter what planet, they’re like a shadow over human evolution, gradually drawing nearer. Now I wouldn’t say this is as strong a story as Spare Parts, but I think it’s a very worthy TV parallel and, in my opinion, the best Cyberman story the show has ever done. I have talked about it loads of times now in regards to the Cybermen stories I prefer, the ones that focus on the horrors of conversion, something I felt the show wouldn’t be able to get away with for a family friendly audience, but Moffat really pushes the limit with what he could get away with. Some of these scenes where Bill’s exploring the rundown hospital with these eerie patients that are almost unrecognisable, some of which can only talk through a voice box, and some have actually had their voice boxes turned off because they were screaming things like “kill me!” I mean good lord Moffat!!! Which builds to a chilling scene where Bill is about to have her final treatment where she will be “made better”, by a hospital doctor no less, people you’re supposed to trust with your lives, and we just see him holding up that oh so familiar headgear for her to stare at in horror.

I was wrong when I said this was one of the most brutal ordeals a companion’s ever gone through, this is honestly THE most brutal thing a companion’s ever gone through, being shot through the chest, spending a decade trapped in a creepy hospital and then turned into a Cyberman!!! Pearl Mackie really doesn’t get enough credit for her time in the show, she is absolutely fantastic in this story, especially in part two where it seems her conversion isn’t quite as perfect as most Cybermen, and we get some of my favourite bits of directing in the show where we cut back and forth between her perspective as herself and her Cyberman form.