In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

Well, so! The Brain of Morbius Doctors are now fully explained, and we never have to worry about the Doctor being limited to twelve regenerations again.

Instead, we get to wonder where on earth the Timeless Child came from in the first place - that unknown realm, dimension or universe through the gateway over the monument. Wherever it is, it's effectively now the new Gallifrey. How exciting!

Also, Ko Sharmus was bloody brilliant, and how lovely to see a couple of TARDISes with working chameleon circuits.

I was afraid Yaz and / or Graham were going to die for a while there, when they were doing emotional speeches to one another (well, as far as Yorkshire folks go along those lines), but am glad they didn't. It does look rather like the regular companions won't be in the festive episode at the end of this year, though - or perhaps ever again? Who knows.

Looking back over this series, there are various themes which have culminated here. Family has been a recurring theme, but was especially important in Orphan 55 (LJ / DW) - and even the title of that episode has a stronger resonance now we know the Doctor him / herself was found as an orphan child. Then there has been the telling of origin stories, particularly prominent in Can You Hear Me? (LJ / DW) and culminating here in the Master's narration of the Doctor's origins. And of course the history of technology, striking me first when I watched Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror (LJ / DW) and ending up here in the Master's Cyber-Timelords. Heck, even the weird wiping of Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan's memories in Spyfall, part 2 (LJ / DW) which really annoyed me at the time, and even more so when it wasn't applied to other human historical characters later, now kind of makes sense as a foreshadow of the Doctor's own partially-eliminated memories.

Just one complaint - wot no Jack???? I hope he will be back in the festive special.

Well, that was pretty powerful. I got a bit teary during Yaz's bit with the 50p especially. I feel like I know and understand her as a character a lot better now.

On paper it had a hell of a lot to fit in for the time available while still leaving space for emotional conversations about people confronting their fears and insecurities at the end, but I guess the villains of the week were quite simple and straightforward in the end, which is what allowed it to work.

Great villains, though! Gods of Pain and Fear - excellent in themselves and a nice prelude to next week's episode too. Just as the awkward yet somehow effective tone of the emotional conversations felt like they were building on Graham's little man-to-man chat with Jake last week. It all lends a sense of coherence to the season as a whole, beyond the Doctor's renewed vision of the tower and the Timeless Child.

Very interesting that Zellin should reference the Celestial Toymaker, subject of a Hartnell story, given the Hartnellish feel of the Ruth-Doctor, and the Master's hints of dark things in his and the Doctor's origins. This season is very definitely poking and prodding at that early era in the programme's history - and three cheers for that!

Well, wow! It's quite a thing when ( a very spoilery thing ) is not the biggest surprise reveal of the episode.

( I will cut this whole thing, actually. I haven't otherwise bothered to do that with Doctor Who this season, but this episode had some reveals that are genuinely best seen unspoiled )

I really enjoyed this episode. I mean, massively more than Spyfall parts 1 and 2, actually. They were fine and enjoyable, but this one had me really rapt with the story structure and contents.

It was a genre of story I utterly love (base under siege / bottle episode / cabin fever story), and absolutely delivered on the things I want from that kind of narrative - people rising to the occasion, discovering their courage, and revealing their core priorities. The moment when Bella suddenly and unexpectedly turned on the rest of the group was mint. (She was also absolutely red hawt, which did not hurt.)

It also had two nice clear themes - just the right amount to give the story direction and structure without overloading it. One was the eco-horror, complete with the reveal that It Was Earth All Along - and I am guessing miss_s_b in particular appreciated the way that the Russian subway sign which attested to that referenced Six's The Mysterious Planet. My mind went to climate change as soon as the Doctor started talking about how there is always an elite who evacuate out in 'societies that let this happen', and then got confused when people later started talking about nuclear winters, thinking it had all gone a bit old-school. But of course, as her speech about how the food chain collapses and then there is mass migration and war spelt out, it's all linked together. I also really appreciated the fact that the closing note for the episode was an explicit exhortation not to let this happen in our Earth's future. That felt in the spirit of the Pertwee era to me, and part of what I think Doctor Who jolly well should be doing.

The second big theme was family relationships. This popped up in the very first few lines of dialogue, about how the companions didn't know it was 'the mating season' for whatever they were having to clear up in the TARDIS, and then bubbled gently along throughout. It's in the episode name, Benni's belated marriage proposal, Ryan and Bella swapping their experiences of parental death, the relationship between Sylas and his father, and the evolution from humans to Dregs, and of course pays off in plot terms in this episode in the central conflict and then resolution between Bella and Kane. But it was such a Thing that I wonder whether it might not prove to extend beyond this episode alone, and be related to the Big Secret which the Master found in Gallifrey's history.

I also felt it was visually well designed. I thought the early shots of the Dregs, when they first appeared in the Spa and were threatening Ryan and Bella in particular, were very nicely done - good use of mists, silhouettes and partial glimpses to make them really scary. I also noticed at this stage that they were visually likened to another human character trying to escape them and running his hand along the wall in the same way as they did - a link which retrospectively proved to have been deliberately set up for us, once the reveal came about who they 'really' were.

Wikipedia tells me that the writer for this story was somebody called Ed Hime, who has only previously contributed one other Doctor Who story, It Takes You Away (the one with the hypno-toad in an isolated Norwegian cabin), which I also really liked. So that's a name to keep an eye out for in future - though we won't see his work again in this series, apparently.

Footnotey disclaimer - I've no idea how anyone other than the main characters' names were spelt, as there is no Wikipedia page up for this episode yet and the end credits went too fast for me. I reserve the right to amend my current guesses as and when there's better information available.

Edit - the Wikipedia page is up now, and I've corrected some names accordingly (Cain > Kane, Silas > Sylas).

I voluntarily missed this on New Year's Day, as I wanted to concentrate properly on Dracula first, so left it until today to catch up on it. I didn't seek out reviews for obvious reasons, but inevitably I saw a bit of passing chat on Facebook and Twitter, so knew the true identity of Sacha Dhawan's character before I began. A pity, as it must have been nice to experience that as a proper twist.

I enjoyed the episode anyway, though. Doctor Who does James Bond should be a pretty solid formula, because they both trade on the same balance of heroics, silliness and occasional solemnity, and this story fully embraced the possibilities. Seeing the 'fam' getting presented with cases full of hi-tech spy gadgetry, playing at the casino games and doing a car-motorbike chase across the fields was great fun, and casting Stephen Fry as Control was genius. (I meant, that C has to be a reference to his A Bit of Fry & Laurie character, doesn't it? His utter oblivion about the fates of UNIT and Torchwood would suggest so.) Fab to have Lenny Henry on board too - both people who feel like they should have appeared in Doctor Who long ago.

I think it's a good thing for the series that we have a steady TARDIS team in place now. Because there are four of them, I felt it took quite a while to really get to know them all last season, but now I feel like I have a good handle on them all and can enjoy all their little character-moments. I was also glad I'd taken the opportunity to visit Swansea's Brangwyn Hall last summer when I was there on my final external examiner visit to their School of Classics, Ancient History and Egyptology, since it was very recognisably the location used for MI6 HQ. I was about to link to the post where I'd put all the pictures... but then I realised I never actually put them here, just on Facebook. Here's a couple uploaded now instead:




The mysterious beings from another reality look kinda Cyberman-shaped to me, perhaps not readable by the sonic screwdriver or using any intelligible language known to the TARDIS because at the moment they are projections made out of pure data? But of course we'll find out tomorrow evening!

I'd lost count a bit when I sat down to watch this, so didn't realise it was the final episode of the season until the continuity announcer said so at the end. I'd thought there was one more. Still, I did obviously notice the closure of the Tim Shaw / Stenza / stolen planets / Grace's death arc opened in the season's first episode, as well as the stirring programmatic speech about why it's important to keep exploring the universe at the end. It was a solid closer, with Ryan's success in persuading Graham away from his plans of revenge on Tim Shaw a particular strength. I enjoyed meeting the Uk (sp?) too, and the gentle exploration of both the potency and the vulnerabilities of religious faith which they allowed.

Overall I think this season has been a success. I like Jodie Whittaker's Doctor, I like the companions, the story quality has been strong overall, with some excellent ones and only a couple of duds. That said I do also know it hasn't excited me on the same level as the First Doctor's stories with Ian, Barbara and Susan, the Fourth's with Sarah Jane or the Tenth's with Donna. I'm not even quite sure why - it is something small and emotive, about taking time to enjoy the little things and engage with ordinariness in the middle of the adventure and the fantasy, I think. It is probably more important to have a solid platform which is open to plenty of new people to come in and play around with, which certainly is the case with the current set-up, than to have something exceptional now but resting on one person who won't be able to sustain it indefinitely, though.

So, I'm looking forward to the New Year special, and will certainly be watching next season.

This story raised the question of the Doctor's non-interference policy for Earth history early on, when Yaz asked "even if something's not right?", but it also found two ways to dodge really answering it. Graham's insistence that he has never heard of Bilehurst (sp?) Crag equates to the way Hartnell and Troughton's pure historical episodes were increasingly slotted into explicit gaps in the historical record (e.g. The Highlanders), while this one eventually proved to be a pseudo-historical in any case.

I'm afraid I found the Moxon hordes pretty underwhelming once they were released from their tree and able to speak through what had been Becka Savage - just another roaring monster, blithering about its plans and then being implausibly-easily defeated, really. There was also a bit of a stylistic mis-match between crisp, twinkling King James and the dreich, dismal atmosphere of the village - itself sometimes so muddy it threatened to tip over into Monty Python or Maid Marian and her Merry Men-style comedy territory. And I fully expected to hear at some point exactly what had happened to Mistress Savage's husband and why she had had all horses shot - some poor script editing there, perhaps, leaving unresolved loose threads?

Still, the early witch-ducking sequence was pretty good, as were the possessed revenants; there was just enough dialogue about systemic misogyny without it becoming preachy; and I enjoyed both Siobhan Finneran as Becka Savage and Alan Cummings as the king - especially when he was flirting with Ryan. I think I'd sum this one up as 'could have better, but definitely not bad'. Certainly better than last week's, anyway, which I liked less and less the more I thought through its implications over the couple of days following its broadcast.

Gosh, that was powerful. I mean, I would totally defer to anyone from an Indian or Pakistani background about the details of it, and whether it did justice to the time and the people depicted. But it had me absolutely gripped and entranced, and often close to tears. It was a really good example of how history in microcosm, told here through just two families, can feel so much more immediate than Great Men and Great Events.

Really interesting, too, to see how that was incorporated into the format of Doctor Who. Rosa gave us fairly traditional pseudo-history, in which the Doctor and her friends had to fight to protect history from being derailed by an alien threat, but the aliens in this episode turned out to be ( spoilery )

One final, minor note. Obviously this was Yaz's story above all, and I definitely felt I had come to know her and her family much better by the end of it. (Though I would love to know when we were supposed to understand the final scene between her and her grandmother as happening - on a quick trip back to her home time? Or after all her travels with the Doctor are over?) But for some reason for me this was also the episode where I finally felt I had really clicked with Ryan. I've found him a bit difficult to grasp so far, probably mainly because the life experience of a young black man is pretty far away from mine, but maybe also because he is quite quiet and laconic anyway. But there was something about the way he took this setting and story in his stride, so respectful of everyone around him and ready to do whatever was needed to help people and ease tensions, that just finally made me get him and really feel warm towards him. So, glad to meet you properly Ryan. Here's to all of Team TARDIS' further adventures.

I have been around and about all over the place lately, racking up a week-long trip to Romania followed by two successive weekends in Whitby and Warwick. Weekends are when I tend to write LJ / DW posts, so I now have a huge backlog of things to write about caused by being busy doing interesting things in exactly the time I might otherwise be writing about them. But things are calming down now, I am back on top of work and my first weekend at home in almost a month approaches. So I'm ready to start catching up on myself, and step one in that is apparently getting up to date with Doctor Who posts. Obviously Rosa in particular is long past now and many people have written lots of interesting commentary on it, so I will just stick to a few points which particularly struck me.

I spent quite a lot of time thinking about how Doctor Who deals with history in the run-up to giving a Classical Association paper on the topic in 2010. I never published that - indeed, it was never really intended for publication - but I covered the core points in this post on my real-name blog. Broadly, the series has always operated on the unspoken assumption that the Doctor cannot be seen to be changing known Earth history, because that would break the fantasy that it is taking place in our real world. But the character's development, by the time Troughton took over, into a hero who travelled the universe helping people was incompatible with this, because such a figure would naturally seek to right historical wrongs on Earth, thus changing the course of our history. Hence the evolution of the 'pseudo-historical' story, in which the Doctor saves the Earth from an unrecorded alien threat and preserves the history we know - see e.g. The Shakespeare Code.

That's essentially what we have here, but the reason for preserving the core historical event of Rosa Parks' arrest is emphatically not the abstract one of preserving history for its own sake, but the socially-driven one of wanting to preserve the improvements for BAME people and their status which it brought about. Likewise, Krasko, the 79th-century time traveller actively wants to undo those changes, and has targeted a pivotal moment of historical change as a way of achieving that. That makes this episode all about contested histories. In real life we debate the details of what happened at a particular moment in history, what it really meant at the time or later on, or (in extreme cases such as holocaust denial) whether it really happened. And where people's rights, status or identities are contingent on the historical interpretation chosen (as is almost always the case with history, in fact), those debates can get very heated. In this episode, with time travel added into the mix, we essentially had a heightened allegorical version of those debates - what would happen if one way of 'winning' the debate would be to go back in time and change the actual history to suit your line of argument?

As a historian, I really liked that idea, but precisely because I found it so powerful and so close to many of the issues I see and engage with professionally, I would ideally have liked it to be given a bit more space. I wanted to know more about Krasko's social and cultural context and his thought processes. Was he an entirely lone wolf, or did he see himself as acting on behalf of a large fascist contingent? What is it about 79th-century society that has given rise to his actions, and what in particular does he anticipate will come of undoing Rosa Parks' arrest back in his own time-line? Has he even over-fetishised Rosa's action, to the extent that he is in fact entirely wrong that erasing that one act will undo all of the progress which collectively came out of the Civil Rights movement? The effort which the Doctor and her companions put into stopping him from changing anything implies he is right about the significance it will have, but I would have welcomed a line or two somewhere about social and political change not being entirely contingent on a particular person on a particular bus at a particular time.

All of that makes me sound a bit grumpy about this episode, but only really because I felt it was actually a very impressive approach to a sensitive historical event, and would have loved to see it nudged just a notch or two further along towards excellence. For a family-oriented TV entertainment show, though, it did about as well as could reasonably be expected with both historiography and of course the primary focus of racism. I thought it was particularly important to have included the conversation between Ryan and Yaz behind the bins about the racism they personally experience on a regular basis in the 21st-century UK, which did acknowledge that a single act by Rosa Parks didn't magically solve all racism, not to mention hopefully prompting some white viewers who haven't done so before to empathise with the everyday experiences of BAME people.

Overall very good, and because of the point at which it came in the series, very reassuring for those of us who have been worried about how this sort of material might be handled in a show which doesn't have a particularly brilliant track record with minority and underprivileged characters.

Ooh! That was good, wasn't it? Good enough to make me want to write about it here, anyway, which I haven't managed for the last season-and-a-half.

Jodie Whittaker definitely gives good Doctor. Just the right balance between warm and human and strange without being too mannered. And I liked how the extended episode time allowed plenty of space to develop and introduce all the characters. I'm not sure I was wild about the alien threat, who felt a bit two-dimensional, but then again I get how you need a fairly simple villain when the real business of the episode is introducing a new Doctor and her companions, and I did enjoy the stuff about how he was cheating his way to get power, and what kind of leader did that mean he was going to make? Definitely felt like a broken-state-of-modern-politics reference to me.

I like how the Doctor built her new sonic screwdriver / Swiss army knife out of actual Sheffield steel, and chose her new outfit from a charity shop. And I liked the use of the cranes, too. As someone who regularly drives through Sheffield (on my way between Leeds and Birmingham), they are very much one of the major icons of the city to me. In the run-up to Christmas, they string lights along them. Oh, and the drunk guy mocking the alien dude by saying "Halloween's next month, mate." That felt like a shout-out to all the Goths - and perhaps also a sign that the original plan was to broadcast this episode slightly earlier in the year, as of course Halloween is in fact now later this month.

I could really have done with Grace not dying, partly because she was just awesome and I wanted her on the TARDIS team, and partly because it felt like a rather token, deliberate mechanism for signalling how High the Stakes are in the Doctor's world. But at least, if that was going to be the case, they gave time and space to the consequences of her death, to the extent of showing her funeral - have we ever even had a funeral in Doctor Who before? I can't think of one. Anyway, of the team that's left, I'm pretty sure Graham is going to be my favourite as we go on. He seems very kind and good-hearted, and I just loved his very relatable and human focus on the threats they were facing - like the way he was the one who kept going back to the issue of the DNA bombs, and how long did they have?

It's too early to be sure how this new era will pan out, or what Chris Chibnall has lined up, but I certainly didn't get much sense of any Big Arc being established - I mean, no Crack in Time or Impossible Girl or anything like that. Just the Doctor and some randomly-collected people off for an adventure into space. That actually makes it feel fresher and more exciting than I think all Moffat's Big Arcs generally did, so I hope things stay that way. Here's to a new era.