The Costume of The Doctor

So the BBC have released the first official image of Peter Capaldi's costume as the Twelfth Doctor.

To be honest, I find it a bit boring. It's a nice cut and good colour, but it's very plain and quite contemporary. The only bit of flash is the red lining of the coat, which is really only visible in this picture because they've strategically flipped the coat back to reveal it.

What happened to the kookiness in The Doctor's outfit? I'm not saying we need to go to the levels of Colin Baker's technicolour dream coat, or even Sylvester McCoy's question mark emblazoned sweater vest, but The Doctor has always shown a penchant for slightly left of field fashion.

The First Doctor had his funny little hat. Two has his tartan pants. Three stole a stage magician's costume. Four's outfit was a delightful mish-mash of clothing that somehow still worked as a whole. Things started going off the rails with Five and his celery and question marks, but the cricket whites were a good choice.

These costumes all spoke of a man who wasn't familiar with Earth dress, or didn't bother trying because you never know what's going to be in style where you're going anyway. It indicates a man eccentric enough to be unconcerned with fitting in, and maybe cheeky enough to have a subtle laugh at people too. Above all, it shows The Doctor is a man who is constantly out of time.

Sadly, since the reboot The Doctor has generally had rather sensible contemporary clothing. Nine had a t-shirt and leather jacket and ten had quite a nice suit (or two). Eleven took steps back to The Doctor of old, with that slightly out of time look. Having nicked his first outfit from an old man, it created that juxtaposition of a young bloke wearing old man clothes. Then we get a costume change with The Snowmen, and The Doctor gets all Steampunk. Frankly I'm surprised they didn't have him keep the top hat.

And here we are now with Twelve dragging us back to a boring contemporary suit. Such a missed opportunity. Maybe he'll get a cool hat.

Review - Rise of the Cybermen

Another classic Who Monster storms back, albeit with a rather clumsy retcon in Rise of the Cybermen.

Season 2, Episode 5 - Rise of the Cybermen

From the outset we know what the monster of this episode is because, much like Season 1's Dalek, it's in the title of the episode. That said, they do a great job of hiding the Cybers until right near the end of the episode. This is a major benefit of the two-parter. You get that awesome cliffhanger reveal.

Look out! A vaguely man-shaped blob!

We pick up the TARDIS Crew as they get smashed between realities and land in an alternate version of Earth. Of course Rose soon discovers her Dad is alive in this dimension, leading her to immediately run off to find him. Micky takes the opportunity to do the same thing whilst almost petulantly pointing out that The Doctor will always go after Rose. This gives us a chance to get some rather clumsily inserted back-story for Micky which unfortunately telegraphs his eventual fate pretty clearly. Let's be honest, "he doesn't have any family left" is a rather foreboding phrase to hear uttered, on par with "I'm two weeks from retirement," or, "I think I'll wear my red shirt for the trip to the mysterious planet's surface."

Mickey gets a chance to shine in this episode though, even if it is as an alternate version of himself. Ricky is a total bad-ass, a fact that somehow redeems Mickey's portrayal as a bit of a goofy, spineless doormat. He is ripped though, a fact we are made plainly aware of. The split screen with Mickey and Ricky are well done with only a couple of poorly synced lines when they're both on screen together.

Lumic is a nice Big Bad, although he positively reeks of Davros. A crippled genius determined to expunge weakness from his race. I think it's a real shame this reboot or retcon or whatever you want to call it makes the Cybermen a bit too much like the Daleks. I find the idea of a race voluntarily moving towards a new form to be far more compelling than that of one forced or tricked into change by one man. 

He does have better teeth than Davros though.

That said, the way Lumic's plot unfolds through this episode is nice. The small-scale start which ramps up to the roll out of industrial conversion works well. I would have liked to see Cybus cybernetic technology being used in more ways than the Ear Buds. Some cybernetic arms, legs and even eyes would have been not only shown people's willingness to upgrade their weak flesh, but reinforced the differentness of the alternate dimension. You know, beyond all the airships.

Airships are huge in alternate dimensions. Airships and goatees.

Rose's conversation with alternate-Jackie was well done and gave both actors some time to show their chops. I can't help but feel Jackie's outburst at the end was there less to remind us that Rose is not her daughter and more to make her less sympathetic in the lead up to her assimilation.

All up, this is a solid episode with few of the regular issues that really bug me. Rose and The Doctor still have an odd relationship. Is it romantic or paternal? It's not really a focus of the episode though, with the threat of Cybus clear from the off. Definitely up there amongst my favourites.

8/10

Can we fix it?

There's not too much that needs doing the the overall plot here, but I feel the setup and the linking of the classic Mondas Cybermen and the new Cybus ones needs a tweak.

First off, I'd change Lumic a tad. Make him less of a genius himself and more a rich industrialist using his wealth and influence to overcome his own body's weakness. At the same time we see him reluctant (possibly even scared) to actually use these developments himself. This could be shown to raise questions from some people. Why get about in a wheelchair when your company makes cybernetic legs? Why the respirator when you could have robo-lungs? This would raise a little flag early on that there is something dangerous about the upgrades.

Second, a slight tweak to the Cybus technology. With a pinch of Terminator 2 and a dash of Dollhouse, we can flesh out the background of the rise of Cybus Industries and at the same time reinforce those parallels with our own desires to constantly upgrade.

Early on, the TARDIS crew only realise the ear buds were unusual because everyone stops dead in the street to receive an update. Seriously, that's dangerous, and therefore stupid, so let's get rid of it. Instead Rose bumps into a man in the street who turns around to reveal a very Cyberman looking visor. Rose screams, to which the man replies, "I know, right? Brand new model. Camped out all week, but I was first in line to upgrade."

As he wanders off Rose comments that they look like uncomfortable sunglasses. The Doctor tells her they're not sunglasses. After this they start noticing more cyber technology. Clinics offering cyber upgrades. Workmen with cyber limbs with built-in tools. Maybe even an advert for the upcoming Cyber Games (sponsored by Cybus).

Later when Rose and Pete are talking, we would learn that one of Cybus' early breakthroughs was a neural link that allowed the human brain to interface directly with computers. This technology is at the heart of every Cybus product, and lets the brain control the computer as well as provide additional processing power. This partnership of brain and computer worries Rose and she asks what stops the computer being used to control the brain. Pete simply asks who would want to do that.

This conversation would reinforce earlier scattered hints that this original technology was derived from something alien. Very Terminator 2, I know, but having Lumic discover parts of a ruined Mondas Cyberman avoids the odd dual origin. Weather the original specimen is from an alternate Mondas that didn't thrive, or had washed up as dimensional flotsam in a similar manner to how the TARDIS ended up there, it doesn't matter.

We end this episode on the same note, but with a clearer connection between the original Cybermen and this new breed.

Review - The Time Of The Doctor

Matt Smith bows out as The Doctor in this years much awaited Christmas Special, The Time Of The Doctor.

Christmas Special 2013 - The Time Of The Doctor

First up, a quick apology for the almost one month delay in getting this up, but my original no-fixes review went up a while ago on Geek-O-Rama.net and it really did take a lot of thought to figure out how to fix this one. But on to the review.

Oh my good God. I'm so glad I didn't watch this immediately, it would have spoiled my Christmas buzz. This was not only a total shambles of a story that packed in a whole bunch of unnecessary sexual innuendo, but it revisited almost every reference from Smith's tenure that annoys me. Ordinarily this is where I would say, "but it was all worth it for the twenty seconds of Peter Capaldi at the end", but seriously, it wasn't.

To start with, the relationship between The Doctor and Clara continues to be confused, with her confirmation she "fancied him" whilst bringing The Doctor in as a fake boyfriend despite him originally getting the wrong end of the stick and pretty much saying he'd be up for the real deal. I must say I am hoping for a dramatic reduction in this sort of thing with Capaldi as Twelve. It's just so boring.

The In-Who-Endos fly thick and fast in the opening minutes. I mean, what was the deal with the hologram clothes? The concept of being nude in church is an interesting one, being bare before God and so forth, but with no explanation, and in combination with Tasha Lem's alter-shaped bed, I'm left assuming that it's just there to poke fun at religion by sexualising it.

*Deftly avoids joke abut Holy of Holies*

It's not the first time I've sensed this kind of jab at organised religion in a Moffat story, either. Previous appearances such as The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone and A Good Man Goes To War saw The Church as largely Anglican, and the prominence of openly gay couple The Fat One and The Thin One was either a reference to the already evolving Anglican Church (female ministers etc) or just a cheap gay joke. With Moffat it's hard to tell. Now we see The Church as being somehow related to a very Catholic sounding Papal Mainframe.

We also saw a big slab of Hunka Hunka Burning Doc with The Doctor and Tasha Lem. Their sexual banter was so overt that I found myself waiting for the reveal that she was somehow a regenerated River Song. When did The Doctor have the time to develop this kind of long-term sexual relationship with a woman who wasn't River? It clearly wasn't as Eleven, so was Ten putting it about even more than we realised? It was all so unnecessary though. None of it added to the story one iota, and the flash of naked Matt Smith at the start seemed pure fan-service.

 

It was as if a million fan-girls cried out in pleasure.

Again, we have a case of Too Many Monsters, although it did seem to make some sense as to why they were there. I worried when the teaser came out because it was cut in a way that made it seem the whole thing was a set-up, much like the Pandorica plot-line. The teasers also had me face-palming at the return of the Silence, but again, in context they were relevant. I actually liked the idea that they were professional confessors, but after a second thought, It doesn't make much sense because half the point of confession is the act of confession, so even if you are getting some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion of penance, you're losing all the psychological benefits of confession by forgetting that you've actually done it. I was also quite upset for the Sontarins, who seem to have been relegated to comic relief. Don't get me wrong, Strax is a great character and pulls off comic relief well, but to make all Sontarins appear inept and stupid is a real shame.

 

One of the most fearsome military forces in the universe. No, seriously.

The episode just seemed a ham-fisted attempt to tie all of Eleven's season arcs into one grand overarching plot. Unfortunately instead of a mind-blowing climax to everything we've seen the past four years, all we got was a self-referential mish-mash with no real direction beyond tying up all of the loose ends. But you know what? Sometimes loose ends are a good thing. Case in point, the only thing that wasn't resolved was the return of Gallifrey. In a way I am looking forward to that being The Doctor's main objective moving forward. I hope it can be left unresolved for a long time, much like the holy scriptures in Monkey.

The whole thing just seemed to drag, and when I wasn't groaning because of some fresh innuendo or the reappearance of those thrice-damned Weeping Angels, I was checking to see how much longer it had to go. By the time we got to see the regeneration, I was over it. Capaldi's final line was a classic though.

 

Can you fly this thing?

I won't be rushing out to watch this one again.

4/10

Can we fix it?

I'm really struggling to see how we can fix this without a ground-up re-write. The entire episode seemed geared towards cramming in as many references to Eleven's tenure as possible, which sadly left little room for an actual story.

The bare bones of the episode, the Timelords calling through the crack, is a solid premise, but it just wasn't effectively played out. Many elements seem to have been included purely to fit with the existing prophesy, making for a rather jumbled scenario.

My main beef with the basic premise is the concept of the "Truth Field", which seems to me to be something an advanced race like the Timelords would have little trouble bypassing. I mean every man and his dog can recognize psychic paper now, so surely The Doctor wouldn't be susceptible to something like that. It seems to really only be there to fulfil the conditions of the prophesy. If it had to stay for that reason, at least have it that the Timelords knew The Doctor could still lie in a Truth Field but were using it to screen out "lesser" life forms.

And in the end, even though the Truth Field covers the bit of the prophesy that states, "when no living thing can speak falsely" it fails to address the next bit, specifically, "or fail to answer." The Doctor fails to answer for 300 years. Hell, he fails to answer at all, in the end. I really thought the prophesy was referring to the events of The Name of The Doctor where he was being forced to speak his name, and would have considered the matter resolved at that point.

The connection to The Silence could have been better too. Madame Kovarian should have featured, possibly as a subordinate to Tasha Lem who argues with her about how to handle the situation. Kovarian ultimately takes a group of followers and time travels to attempt to kill The Doctor. This removes the need for Lem's Faith Change, which felt really forced in.

The Papal Mainframe could also remain a neutral party maintaining the lockout of the planet, meaning the small incursions faced by The Doctor actually make sense as small groups penetrate the defenses. This also removes the need for the stupid human Daleks, which were an idiotic idea in Asylum of the Daleks, and completely unnecessary here.

With a tighter opening and none of the sexual innuendo, we can move to the actual siege quicker and then spend more time on the individual conflicts rather than an 80s style montage. This would lead up to the final battle after Lem is killed by the Daleks rather than assimilated.

It still wouldn't be great, but most of the major issues would be gone and it'd feel less forced. 

Review - The Girl in the Fireplace

The Doctor learns how to "dance" with the first in a long line of female historical figures in The Girl in the Fireplace.

Season 2, Episode 4 - The Girl in the Fireplace

Yo Dawg! I heard you like time travel, so I put some more time travel into your time travel show. This episode makes extra special use of time travel. The idea of one participant in the story taking the long road whilst the other skips ahead is very interesting. Of course the episode is apparently loosely based on The Time Traveller's Wife, so we cant award too many points for that. We do get more touches of the culture shock theme, with Reinette having that same "left behind" experience. She handles it much better than Rose or Sarah Jane though.

We skip between a space ship in the far future that's been repaired using bits of its crew, and pre-revolutionary France. I liked the way the characters were split between the timelines. It gave Rose and Mickey a chance to prove themselves without The Doctor. This opportunity could have been exploited a lot more than it was though, as the episode was squarely focussed on The Doctor, almost the complete opposite of The Companion Show featuring The Doctor. Strangely this is almost as bad as focusing on the Companion more than The Doctor. There really does need to be a good balance.

You stay here. I've got to sort someone out.

THING!

Sort something out.

Our main monster is the Clockwork Robots, who again fit the mould of advance slowly and be creepy. They work in this story though, despite no explanation of why they are made of clockwork. I mean a teleport, no matter how short-range, must require a power source beyond mere clockwork.

As if the French aristocracy wasn't creepy enough.

The whole episode is pure Hunka hunka burning Doc though. Reinette jumps The Doctor's bones with little more than two brief meetings when she was a little girl and a five minute conversation under her belt. Moffat keeps the dance metaphor going strongly in this story, dropping a very strong implication that The Doctor and Reinette had sex.

The relationship is solidly written though, and for whatever reason I can accept this sexualisation of The Doctor more than any other instance in the show. Perhaps this is a testament to Moffat's writing. I can believe that this girl successfully got through the layers and seduced The Doctor through a combination of her natural charm and his innate need to protect. 

Not to mention being face-meltingly hot.

The pacing of this episode is spot on. The short-range teleports combined with the nature of the time windows and the Clockwork Men's mission means they can be easily fended off with little fear of them returning until much later. This gives us little bursts of action amongst the talking and flirting. It was nice to see Rose get her comeuppance though. At least she had Mickey as a fall-back.

The climax of the episode was great, with The Doctor not only risking all and stranding himself in the past (albeit with a smoking hot lover) but doing so by riding in on a white charger. Not the only fairy tale parallel in this episode, but definitely the coolest.

Of course there couldn't be a happily ever after in this situation. What we did get was perfect though.

I've just got something in my eye... Again.

Despite the whole episode being pretty much all about The Doctor falling in love and someone falling in love with him, I enjoyed it. Removing this episode from the context of ongoing instances of Hunka hunka burning Doc, it works as that one time a girl managed to turn his head. It is significantly diminished by all the other times it happens (or is implied to happen) though.

Still, a very watchable episode, with much more of an historical feel about it despite its quite solid sci-fi core.

8/10

Can we fix it?

I'm sure many would be expecting me to demand less Doctor love here, but in all honesty in the context of this episode, I'm fine with it. All of the bits with The Doctor and Reinette are great. But when you look past that the rest seems a tad light on. 

I feel if we had a bit more meat on the bones of the Rose and Mickey side of this story, we could have found out more about how the ship and its attendant robots got into the state they did.

The way I see it, the ship originally only had a small group of maintenance droids. These robots cannibalised themselves for parts first, replacing higher tech systems used in repairs to the ship with hastily manufactured clockwork facsimiles. Having used up their own parts, they turned on the crew, replacing their bits with clockwork too. A nice Tin Man parallel to go with some of the other fairy tale stuff in this episode. The clockwork is clearly a unique design, with The Doctor fawning all over it. That could be the reason why. 

This information could be revealed to Mickey and Rose through Mickey using his awesome computer hacking skills to unearth fragments of video logs from the Captain. This makes the Rose and Mickey section a bit more than wandering the halls waiting for The Doctor to get back so that they can tell him things they've seen and let him figure it out.

These recordings could also hint that the reason the crew couldn't fight the Clockwork Men off or order them to not use them as spares was because they only respond directly to the mission computer. This would be there as an early clue for the audience who realise they only respond to Reinette. When The Doctor finds out he of course puts two and two together without having to interrogate the Clockworks to get it.

We could even go so far as to hint that the original problem with the ship was limited just to the mission computer, and that the repairs made by the droids were purely to create the time windows. They cannibalised the ship to create the time windows, and cannibalised the crew to keep the ship running.

We can still leave the name of the ship as a mystery, but I think this fleshes the ship side of the story out a bit and gives Rose and Mickey something more to do.

The (Insert Noun) of The Doctor

The BBC have released the full poster for the 2013 Christmas Special, The Time of The Doctor.

More like The Time to Get Some New Title Ideas, am I right?

Quite why we had to have an almost identical name to the 50th Anniversary Special and the Season 7 finale, I'll never know. Besides that bit of old news, it looks like they're slapping a bunch of big enemies together again in a Too Many Monsters extravaganza.

Why Angels? I'm so sick of them. They are totally played out as a monster. I had hoped after The Angels Take Manhattan we'd seen the last of them. That was pretty stupid, I suppose. And trotting The Silence out again? What's the point of that? They should have been done and dusted after The Wedding of River Song. Teasers have shown references to Trenzalor as well, another plot point that should have been left alone after it was resolved in The Name of the Doctor.

I'm trying not to draw too many conclusions from this poster and the few teasers, but I fear we're going to get a bit of a cluster-you-know-what here, and my expectations are currently rather low. The best scenario I can imagine sees most of these monsters appearing in some kind of nightmare dream sequence of The Doctor's.

In the end, I'm just hoping the few seconds of Peter Capaldi as The Doctor make it all worthwhile.

Review - School Reunion

A couple of old favourites of mine returns to crank up the nostalgia in School Reunion.

Season 2, Episode 3 - School Reunion

We get thrown straight into this story with The Doctor appearing to be well into his investigation. It had me fearing a Go, go, go, Geronimo! situation, but in the end the pacing ended up quite good. It's obvious from the start that the Headmaster Mr Finch (deliciously played by Anthony Head) is up to something. Hell, we all but see him eat a poor orphan.

Apart from the obvious child chomping, we see the students are being used to do... something. Something with computers and crazy spinning cube graphics. It seems to involve a lot of randomly tapping at the keyboard.

We're trying to get the complete works of Shakespeare.

The Doctor and Rose manage to draw out clues about what's going on in a timely and natural way. Mickey reappears to show us all how he's not just a buffoon, at least not a total one, with his hacking skills getting stronger. And of course we get the wonderful Sarah Jane Smith return. Sarah Jane is an all time favourite companion of mine, so it would be tough for this episode to go too far wrong for me.

The monster reveal stumbled a bit though. It was a reasonable idea to give a glimpse of the undisguised Krillatine under the desk, but it ended up being entirely too much of a glimpse. The transition as he stands up was really smooth though. 

A network cable is unplugged.

We saw a little bit of Deus Ex Screwdriver with a good old Deadlock Seal sitting there like a lump of kryptonite. That didn't end up hampering them much though. The Doctor spent more time investigating what the Krillitines were up to than he did working out a way to stop them. Hell they all spent more time gabbing than even investigating. Despite all that, it worked quite well. 

A big part of this episode deals with that culture shock of a returned companion. This was touched on in The Parting of the Ways with Rose's big emotional speech in the chip shop. Sarah Jane shows us that the displacement felt by Rose at that point never really goes away. Elizabeth Sladen really conveyed the conflicting emotions of joy and resentment a dumped companion would feel. 

Despite their common ground, Rose and Sarah Jane get to be delightfully bitchy with each other at first. Mickey seems to take particular delight in this situation. I think I would too. 

The girlfriend and the ex. Welcome to every bloke's nightmare.

Mickey also delights in rubbing it in to Rose that The Doctor seems to have a thing for traveling with young girls and then upgrading.

I'd go easy on the chips.

This is all a reasonable indication that Mickey is at least a little over Rose at this point. Rose, on the other hand still seems to be trying to keep Mickey on the bench, asking if the situation at the school was the only reason he called, and giving him the flirty eyes. Even at the end of the episode when Mickey decides to join The TARDIS crew, Rose looks really pissed off.

Hey Rose! The boyfriend and the ex. Welcome to every girl's nightmare.

This episode hit me square in the nostalgia, with a bunch of references to old episodes. It moved forward at a decent pace, and despite a lot of interplay between characters it never got bogged down or felt too "talky". Even the Bond Villain explanation of his plan by Mr Finch seemed sort of natural and The Doctor's temptation in the face of his offer seemed genuine. This one is very much a favourite.

9/10

Can we fix it?

Just a couple of tweaks to this one, I think. First up, that initial monster reveal was too much. It needed to just be a quick flash of something inhuman under the desk before the teacher stood up. Looking right at the kid and screeching was over the top and ruined the full reveal later. Just his eyes would have been enough.

Putting a Deadlock Seal in there was a bit lazy. There's several other ways they could have kept The Doctor out of the gubbins. Perhaps there was a booby trap, or breaking in would cause a feedback loop into the kids' minds. The enhanced state the kids are in could leave them open to psychic distress or something. Not hugely important, but an easy fix.

More K-9 would have been nice too, but the episode is already crammed full, so I couldn't begin to suggest where he could fit.

Review - The Day of the Doctor

Well there was a whole bunch of hype leading up to this momentous event. It could have gone either way, but I'm glad to say it lived up to the hype, and I very much enjoyed The Day of the Doctor.

The 50th anniversary Special - The Day of the Doctor

Starting with the original credits and a reference to both Coal Hill Secondary School and the I. M. Foreman scrapyard where we first encountered the TARDIS in An Unearthly Child, right from the off you can see we are set for a whole flood of references to the past 50 years of Doctor Who. We had a couple of references to Omega, a big scarf, some nice bits and bobs in the Black Archive, and to my great pleasure, a reversal of the polarity. Sure, it wasn't of the neutron flow, but obviously The Doctor has sharpened his physics knowledge in recent years.

Nostalgia ahoy!

The Moment was sort of interesting, but I'm still not sure how I feel about it choosing Rose/Bad Wolf as it's interface form. This essentially boils down to getting Billie Piper into the episode somehow, really, but that's fine. It would have been good to see the Interface shift a few times to take on other forms using file footage. Maybe just flicker between them at times, or when first settling on a form.

When Ten and Eleven get together the interplay between them is truly awesome. Matt Smith and David Tennent have a clear chemistry on screen that gives a wonderful energy to the episode. I was worried John Hurt's War Doctor would end up being all dour and sombre and kill the buzz, but he only made things better. I loved every second of Hurt's interplay with the other two Doctors. In a way he was an in-show avatar of me expressing confused bewilderment at where Doctor Who has ended up, commenting on everything from the age of the other Doctors to the use of the phrase "Timey wimey".

They're scientific instruments, not water pistols!

Despite making fun of many of the things that usually irk me, we still had a whopping great In-Who-Endo added when Ten and Eleven compared Sonic Screwdrivers. We had plenty of other bits of funny banter between them without resorting to a tired old dick joke, thanks very much.

Hur hur hur! Willies.

Some of the scene transitions seemed to be a bit weird. I recall one wipe came in far too soon, whilst Kate Stewart was still talking, which seemed a bit sloppy to me. That said, the morph effects on the Zygons were awesome. Really smooth and natural looking. The 3D paintings looked really cool too. I imagine seeing it in 3D would have been quite the treat at that point, but I feel it would have been wasted throughout most of the rest of the episode.

The episode did have some pretty glaring continuity issues though. I'm still struggling to see how this whole thing fits with the events of The End of Time. The Doctor is clearly now looking to find Gallifrey and restore it to the galaxy, but he was previously determined not to let the Time Lords return because they planned to destroy reality. Is the Time Lock the same thing as the Stasis Cube, or are Rassilon and the other Time Lord high council trapped somewhere else? Hopefully subsequent episodes that build on this story and fill in the gaps, because I am rather confused at the moment. I may have to re-watch The End of Time again and see if that helps. It would have been awesome if they got Timothy Dalton back in to play Rassilon though.

There were also some internal story issues with Elizabeth and the Zygons. She would have had to be remarkably quick thinking to be able to replace the Commander and subsequently find out all of the details of the Zygon's plans without arousing suspicion. Overall I found that to be a tad clumsy even with the offhand "they never considered I would survive" line. It was fun to see the gap in Ten's life just previous to The End of Time filled in there. Of course you have to feel bad for Liz because you know she's going to end up bitter and hateful towards The Doctor. I'm also left feeling The Doctor is a bit of a dick for following through with the wedding when he wasn't actually interested. And how is he able to tell Ood Sigma about it? Doesn't he forget? Either way, John Hurt made that little bit of Hunka hunka burning Doc tolerable.

Is there a lot of this in the future?

It does start to happen, yeah.

The Zygon plot was sort of left unresolved. I don't think it would have taken too much to make mention in the closing scenes of whatever resolution they came up with. It felt a little unfinished, or that Steven Moffat decided it wasn't important any more, as we'd moved on to resolving the Time War plot, which was far more interesting and important. In a way it was always just a secondary plot that provided the vehicle for plot exposition as well as the final solution, but it got so much screen time that I feel it deserved more of a resolution than it received.

Throwing Capaldi in there at the end was inspired. I only wish that was the first reveal of him in the role of Twelve. The fan reaction would have been insane, especially if it was just that short flash of his eyes. There would have been so much discussion about who it was. Such a missed opportunity.

Do you recognise these eyes?

Overall I'm excited about how things were left, even if I was a bit annoyed at throwing Tom Baker in there with a weak "reusing old faces" line. Seeking out and freeing Gallifrey is a great way to go, assuming the aforementioned plot confusion is addressed. Most excitingly it gives us an opportunity to resurrect a sorely wasted foe.

The Master is waiting!

10/10

Can we fix it?

No. All we need was a bit more exposition on some of the minor plot points and the removal of a rogue wang reference. It was a perfect homage to the 50 years, encapsulated in that epic final shot.