Month: December 2018

It’s the last episode in the series…but it’s not like any other ‘series finale’ we’ve seen since Doctor Who came back in 2005.

The Doctor and friends answer a call from a planet emitting nine distress signals, and find a psychotropic field affecting people’s mental state.  Protecting themselves with neural neutralisers, they rescue Captain Paltraki, who doesn’t know who he is, and find he’s being blackmailed to bring back an artefact by someone who’s captured his crew.  It’s the Ux religion (which consists of two members, Andinio and her apprentice Delph) doing the blackmailing – they worship a being they call the Creator, who turns out to be Tzim-Sha, the Stenza warrior the Doctor and friends fought all the way back in episode 1.  The Doctor brings back the artefact and confronts Tzim-Sha, who sends the Ux to transmit his Earth-capturing signal – he’s already captured multiple planets and wants to add Earth to his collection.  The Doctor and Yasmin break the connection and persuade the Ux to help them, while Graham and Ryan rescue the crew and send them back to their ship with Paltraki.  Graham stays behind, tempted to kill Tzim-Sha, but realises it’d be better to imprison him forever.  The Ux travel on with the crew, and the TARDIS team depart.  End series!

There’s some nice characterisation here with Graham’s desire for revenge against the creature who caused his wife’s death, and his eventual change of heart.  His relationship with Ryan has also been a really nicely done process over the course of the series.  I also love the fact that the two of them, working together, manage to imprison Tzim-Sha, despite the Doctor’s conviction earlier in the episode that he’d be too powerful for them to take on.  Unfortunately, Yasmin is a bit of a spare part in this episode, just as she was in episodes 8 and 9.  I do like all three companions, but this series really has suffered from the ‘crowded TARDIS’ problem that the show had during the Davison years, with the writers seemingly running out of things for them all to do.  Furthermore, I don’t feel like I really know the characters like I did previous companions – Graham is a great character, but Ryan and Yasmin still both feel a bit thinly sketched to me.

The return of Tzim-Sha is pretty much the only bit of narrative continuity we’ve had this series in terms of alien threat, and after thirteen years of arc-heavy series from RTD and Moffat it’s honestly felt completely disorientating, and made for a strangely sedate final episode.  What do you mean, the fate of the whole universe isn’t at stake?  Where’s the big epic face-off against the Daleks/Cybermen/Master?

And that’s the other thing – there hasn’t been a single returning alien species or character this series, other than the Doctor herself.  The last time that happened was the 1978-1979 series, which was the one with the Key To Time arc.  We’re talking forty years ago, when Tom Baker was still the Doctor.  I’m not saying you absolutely need the Daleks and the like for Doctor Who to feel like Doctor Who, but so much has changed for this series that it would have been nice to have had the odd nod or cameo (the polarity reversal in episode 9 was appreciated, but pretty much the only example!).

Still…no spoilers, but it looks like the New Year’s Day episode might be a bit more of a treat for the fans.  I’m so looking forward to it.

In the penultimate episode of the series, the Doctor and friends arrive in 2018 Norway to find Hanne, a girl trapped in a house and apparently abandoned by her father.  Fighting their way through a dangerous cave called an antizone, the Doctor and companions track Hanne’s father to a parallel reality called a Solitract, which is luring people from the main Whoniverse reality by imitating their loved ones.  After the Doctor and friends reject the Solitract’s tricks, the Doctor persuades it to let her go and accept its fate of being on its own.

We finally have an interesting bit of characterisation here – Ryan doesn’t believe Hanne when she says her father would never abandon her, presumably due to his experience with his own dad.  He later explains to Yasmin that he’s no good with kids, although Hanne does warm to him by the end of the episode.

I like the use of the classic ‘avoiding getting lost in a maze through use of string’ trope!  Unfortunately, the Doctor and co meet up with Ribbons, who is a classic creepy fantasy type monster (complete with beltful of dead rats) and thus feels out of place in the Whoniverse.  Naturally, he cuts the string, causing extra trouble for the Doctor.

When we finally come across Erik, Hanne’s dad, he comes across as the most neglectful father ever and I wanted to throw things at the screen!  However, it soon becomes apparent that he’s been bewitched by the Solitract, which has produced an imitation of his late wife Trine.

When the Doctor’s party arrives, the Solitract immediately sets about playing the same trick on Graham, which means we get the welcome reappearance of Grace and some lovely character moments when Graham finds himself having to make the choice to lose her all over again.

The Doctor explains that the antizone is preventing the Solitract from touching other realities, though not why it’s taken the form of a weird fantasy cave!  We also get some good old-fashioned polarity reversal when the Doctor finds she can’t get back through the mirror portal.

On the whole I enjoyed this one – I was expecting it to be a bit of a filler episode, but it was quite good.

Series finale next time…although in Chibnall’s arc-less Who, I’m not sure they can really be called ‘series finales’ anymore!