I came to this universe with such delight. And I played them all, Doctor. I toyed with supernovas, turned galaxies into spinning tops. I gambled with God and made him a jack-in-the-box. I made a jigsaw out of your history. Did you like it?

Rewatching this episode, my overriding thought is that it is perfectly matched with its chief antagonist. Like the Toymaker themself, The Giggle is a darkly playful story, delighting in introducing an abundance of characters and ideas, toying with them for a few minutes at a time, and then getting bored and discarding them before moving on to the next shiny new thing. But far more than being just a return for an obscure villain, this episode acts as the conclusion to a three part arc, an anniversary episode, AND a regeneration episode. Does it succeed on all those fronts? Let's take a look inside the Toymaker's toybox, shall we?

Considering the episode's A-plot, we start by spending 20 minutes investigating the revelation that everyone on Earth now thinks they are right about everything, in the first of several coming stories to parallel the public response to the COVID-19 pandemic and social media. The social commentary here, while thought-provoking, is a little heavy-handed, but perhaps more importantly, doesn't really fit in with the remaining 40 minutes of the episode - we get a bit of explanation from the Toymaker later on, regarding this being "the game of the 21st century", but to me, it felt like this opening plot was largely dropped after the Doctor and Donna travel back to the 1920s.

For the next 20 minutes, we get various shenanigans with the Toymaker, first in his realm, then with his dance number at UNIT HQ. For me, this was undoubtedly the strongest part of the episode - there's not much plot to speak of, but we get several great, playful scenes in a row. The hall of doors, the giant Toymaker and his puppet, Stooky Sue, the puppet show - these are all really imaginative, visually engaging scenarios which arrive, make a strong impression, and then leave without outstaying their welcome. The Toymaker's dance number was a particular favourite of mine - just a really fun scene which feels like it could only work in an episode like this. Neil Patrick Harris is clearly having great fun too, and his performance really carries this segment of the episode. David Tennant and Catherine Tate struggle to match his energy, for the most part - while Donna briefly comes alive during her confrontation with Stooky Sue, the rest of this segment and the previous one feels rather rote for the two leads, with several character beats being rehashed from RTD'S first time as showrunner (at least we know David Tennant can still do angst). This more serious Doctor and Donna seem very lost in the mad world of the Toymaker for most of this story, which I think is a shame for what is potentially their last appearance in the show.

Moving into the final act, the big focus is on the confrontation with the Toymaker, the Doctor's regeneration, and wrapping up the Fourteenth Doctor. Again, there are some strong visuals here, with the Toymaker astride a giant laser cannon menacing the Doctor and friends. I did find the effect of the Doctor actually being shot with the laser rather bizarre - he sort of pivots backwards, before returning to an upright stance afterwards. It looks very odd, and I wondered if this was because they didn't want the scene to be too violent, especially given I've noticed similar weird choreography in subsequent episodes. After this, the episode fully gives in to the playful spirit of the Toymaker, and we get two more big scenes with very little in the way of logic: the infamous bigeneration and subsequent game of catch. It's very interesting that the Toymaker is effectively defeated by being beaten at his own game (haha) - the implausible arrival of Ncuti Gatwa's joyful, exuberant Fifteenth Doctor, and the two Doctors' ridiculous gambit involving a game of catch, is what leads to his defeat. As a transitional moment from the semi-serious tone of New Who to the more fantastical tone of the current era, I think it is quite clever, and represents an obvious baton pass moment. It's a shame, however,that the bigeneration itself robs Gatwa of the opportunity to make a first impression as the Doctor without his predecessor being onscreen alongside him, as well as two companions and Neil Patrick Harris. Similarly, the final scenes of the episode, in which Fourteen gets a semi-retirement with the Nobles, feel a little wrong to me - for a show that has survived on change for 60 years, having the most famous lead hang around after he should have fully handed over the reins feels both uncharacteristically twee and disappointingly cynical. In particular, the idea that this Doctor's retirement has made him "the happiest he's been in his life" feels strangely at odds with the central ethos of the character.

I think this sense of being at odds with what's expected extends throughout the episode, however - this is a story that doesn't make a whole lot of sense within the context of being a regeneration episode or an anniversary episode. As I said above, Fifteen unfortunately has to share the limelight with Fourteen here, and while I don't mind the idea of bigeneration, it really does just happen out of nowhere - it would have been good to have even a crumb of foreshadowing. On the anniversary front, there also really isn't a lot here - other than the presence of Tennant, Tate, Bonnie Langford and Jemma Redgrave, there are no major returning characters, which leaves vast swathes of the programme's history unrepresented. Even including some additional past companions in the final scene with the Nobles could have helped this to feel more like a celebration of the programme's history, but unfortunately we don't get anything like this. Similarly, there is little in the way of references to eras outside of the First, Sixth/Seventh and Tenth Doctors, besides the puppet show segment and 15's brief discussion with 14 at the end (and even this basically misses out the Twelfth and Thirteenth Doctors' eras). The references to Amy, Clara, Bill and the Flux in the puppet show felt to me like the only time this episode was really interested in building on the eras that came before to create interesting drama, and in fact I think the central thesis of the episode (that the Doctor is burned out and needs to take a break) only works by actively ignoring some of the developments during those eras, such as the Doctor's time on Trenzalore and at St Luke's University. For an episode that acts both as an anniversary and a conclusion to the New Who era of the show, I think this is a real shame - the contrast with 2013's The Day of the Doctor is a stark one in terms of these aspects.

However, to circle back to the comparison with the Toymaker at the start of this review, I don't think this episode cares about logical and emotional consistency with previous eras, or expectations of what an anniversary episode "should" do, or even that its own plot makes sense or has a coherent theme - it really just wants to take a big bunch of ideas, mash them together and play with them for a bit, and who cares how it fits in with anything else. By that metric alone, it is surely a success.