The Doctor is unconscious so long this might as well be a Companion Chronicle. It’s dreadfully boring for most of parts 2 and 3, but it has a fairly strong beginning and end

So the sequel to The Masque of Mandragora wound up being the most invested I’ve been reading this range front to back since the early stuff. It has a really compelling take on 7, which very much justifies this story for me. Ace is also great, and since this is technically an event I guess, the stakes do seem appropriately grand. I would unfortunately say the ending is a major cop out, but for the most part this story is great.

Platt has lost the sauce apparently because this is so boring

I would do anything for that whifferdil. I’m gonna miss him

So, everything that goes on in the A plot is peak Chibnall and if I don’t think about the direction this arc is headed, the Fugitive Doctor is an effective reveal and greater still are the scenes where the two Doctors just get to play off each other. The B plot has aged insanely poorly, both because of the allegations and because of hindsight. The entire thing is worthless, it adds nothing to the plot and is purely nostalgia bait and directly tell the audience what is gonna happen in the finale. Stupid. Relegates Graham, and in the second half, Ryan and Yaz, to the bench this adventure.

Best of the season so far but in part because it feels like a series 11 episode. The fam have nothing to do, Tesla is interesting when playing off Jodie. Edison is obnoxious but not for the right reasons. The Skithra are so basic they forgot that they already did the Racnoss. There’s nothing wrong in this episode that isn’t also recurring throughout the era.

A very, very odd piece of Who when looked at out of context. It is a pure historical, with the only anachronistic elements in the story being the Doctor and the TARDIS. He meets a Japanese soldier, who gets a very heartfelt arc, but the depiction is very dated and pretty problematic. This story is also very nihilistic, and up to this point feels like the culmination of Steve Parkhouse’s Doctor Who. Even The Tides of Time is  very intense for Doctor Who, being much more mystical and abstract. This is a very sharp departure from the Mills/Wagner run, which is more akin to shonen. This comic takes itself very seriously and touches on dark subject matter. There is no monster for the Doctor to fight.

An abysmal episode of the show, and honestly deserves the reputation it has. I think a lot of the Chibnall era isn’t as bad as they say, but this is like a bottom five episode no problem. The Dregs are the most obvious problem. They look like shit and are are not compelling whatsoever. Every shot is either a Dreg that looks like it came from a ps2 game, or a basic corridor except the color of the light is going crazy for some reason.

The twist is really basic and brings nothing new to the table. 13 and the fam are not on top form either. There is a little good stuff with Ryan, but it’s only like one scene where he’s trying to flirt with a girl who can’t act. The “Benni” line has been memed to death but again, it’s warranted. It’s very grating on the ears and it never succeeds in making me care about these two because that old woman can’t act. And then she dies for absolutely no reason.

Overall this is completely skippable. It tries to be an homage to JNT Doctor Who, but doesn’t have any fun with itself. It’s a bore and an annoyance.

Excellent from beginning to end. Easily one of the best uses of the celebrity historical, and Bruce played phenomenally with 13 and Ryan. There are so many moments in this strip that just exude “cool” in the most satisfying way possible. The villain is awesome and this story shows off the unique setting really well. Scott Gray please come back to DWM!

At this point I’m not really looking forward to the influx of Jamie Magnus Stone directed episodes over the next two seasons, and the direction in this episode in particular is exhausting. I feel like the common complaints people have with this era’s closeups, wide lenses, light being far too colorful/distracting, etc, are really laid bare in this episode. No framing/blocking decisions felt motivated at all, and it leaves me as an audience member bored visually and wanting more from the script as a result. And there’s not much to that either so this episode upon rewatch was kind of a dud.

O as the Master is something I became very excited about when I watched this on broadcast. I like him a lot in this episode. Sacha Dhawan’s ability to embody the Doctor’s arch rival. There’s a moment where O tempts Graham to learning more about the Doctor, and talking about her contradictory experiences, very clearly setting up the finale. But I think it’s Dhawan’s subtle Masterisms breaking out that makes the scene interesting. Other than the performance, there is not a single clue that O is not who he says he is. On a screenplay level, it rings very hollow on rewatch, and even Dhawan’s performance ended up being pretty tiring as the show went on from what I remember.

The fam are now structurally not a new family anymore, they’ve been family for a while now. I don’t think this is intentional but there are several scenes in this episode where two of the four talk and it’s always revealing how these characters have very little intimacy and yet we feel like the characters are subtly wanting closer connection. Pretty much every relationship between these four has an unspoken awkwardness to it. For example, when Yaz comes back to the mortal world and Ryan comforts her after abandoning her. He apologizes and pats her shoulder and tells her he’ll never let that happen again and Yaz turns and cries. Now there’s no romance there, it’s just two people who are not intimate with each other, and he can’t help her at all because a closer friend or a significant other would be able to understand Yaz. But instead there’s this underlying sadness that this fam will never be a fully happy family, and they’re all happy together because of shared trauma. I know the mixture of unambitious writing and sincerity of the show is likely the cause for this subtext, but the subtext is there.

I like a lot of what’s going on here though. The globetrotting identity of this story works very well in my opinion. The final fifteen minutes are fantastic. The Kasaavin are neat if not a bit generic. Thirteen has a good moment playing against Lenny Henry, which is probably the highlight of the episode.