A "Quick Guide" to New Who Series 12.

0:00 much the louder end of who fandom reacted to series 11 like i reacted to every bit of who made since 1996 with great subtlety and even more humility the bbc is doubtless being cowed by all the vitriol i'm sure chibnall's been told to play it safe don't give the fans any surprises don't do anything controversial and okay well i'm gonna have to get to that later on i am firmly of the opinion that when a classic whose strengths are new who is that there wasn't a single voice in charge you are the head writer and a producer and between them that decided on the direction of the show what stories should be done stunt casting etc exactly what the showrunner does today at its best you have two creative people with visions that mesh feeding each other ideas and bringing the best out of each other teams like phillip

0:46 henchcliffe the young producer who wanted to take who in an edgier direction and robert holmes the veteran probably the best writer in the show's history who loved reading witty dialogue surrounded by people being murdered together they gave us tom baker's most iconic years i bring all this up because as far as i can tell all the new who show runners would have benefited from this kind relationship for instance russell the davies could have been sprayed with a squirt gun when he suggested stuff like dalek pig slaves and marvin and chibnall would have worked well together for example moffett's whose stuff works better as single episodes when he's allowed to be clever and witty within a structure and chibnall is a great big ideas man who should be kept away from actually scripting most of the time now when the relationship between producer and head writer broke down the effects were

1:32 catastrophic eric sayward famously quit his head writer part with the production of the trial of a time lord and actually sued to stop the show from using a script for the last story and as a result the eventual writers of the filmed version weren't even allowed to be told how the story was supposed to end where was i oh yeah series 12. hinchcliffe and holmes's first series together genesis the daleks is a highlight what's that oh whittaker's series 12. that makes more sense i already did a video about the original series 12. new who series 12 aired from january until march 2020 and opened with a spyfall 2 porter spyfall is the sort of style heavy tongue-in-cheek modern referential style

2:17 story that i [ __ ] hate the name's doctor the doctor all nods and winks and somehow with both too much and too little self-awareness it knows what it's trying to mimic and it desperately wants to be liked having said that this is better than i was expecting this kind of dovetails into the timeless children actually which is the sort of lore heavy atypical story that i usually love but well we'll get to that anyway spyfall the james bond pastiche there's some cool casting here stephen fry's been threatening to appear in who for years so it's nice that he finally made it he was supposed to write an episode set in the british museum back in the ten eight years but it always fell through he's playing c the head of mi6 and i love that they use the job's actual code name

3:03 rather than do a james bond and use another letter the uk's had spymasters since before there was a uk robert cecil the earl of salisbury was one of the most famous operating under james the first and uncovering the gunpowder plot but there's only been a dedicated secret service in the uk since 1909 the first head was sir mansfield smith coming and he would sign letter c in green inc and the tradition stock all the successor has been called c and used green ink the main non-secret villain is kind of a redo of joshua naismith from the end of time but the replaced of the implied incest with him kind of being elon musk he's played by lenny henry which would be a treat if he wasn't terribly miscast in waystad henry is a comedian with a very long career one of the veterans of

3:49 the 80s alternative comedy scene which was a group of young comedians who basically brought punk ethos an attitude to comedy from jennifer saunders to ben elton much the current elder generation of british comedy were involved to some degree henry's mainly done tv comedy but he was briefly touted as anuri murphy in the late 80s and starred in true identity where he basically played eddie murphy if he was a shakespearean actor who fell foul the mob had to pretend to be white and then got mistaken for the guy the mob sent to kill himself everybody got that he was also quite good as a doctor in a comedy sketch [Music] oh doctor what's happening what's happening doctor what shut up this is not an actor that you should cast as a [ __ ] internet billionaire and then have him go small the whole performance is confusing the

4:35 part screams out for slimy confidence and henry is not an under actor by reputation he does what he's doing quiet malice very well it just doesn't make much sense with the character or actor also i'm not sure why his little trained minion is just like patrick trouten but i like it i think the company name vore is a joke vore porn based on being eaten the company is eating everyone's data in order to consume humanity it's funny if you're me sasha dewan is a wonderful master probably my favorite new version he's an ainly and amy is the best but he's way too soon after they made all that noise but character development with michelle gomez's version he should have been one of the other renegade time lords like the ronnie or the monk anyway they hit his identity very well it was a delight to rewatch the first part of spyfall and

5:21 notice all the little hints that he'd stuck in there like this reaction to the theory that daniel barton lenny henry is an alien i i've been through barton's records there are thousands of photos of him online at all ages if he's not human that's one very impressive legend he's put together not impossible though just wonderful his secret being handled so well as in it not being revealed it makes it a massive tragedy that they had to invent a long history between his cover identity and the doctor and just mention a couple of lines of dialogue chibnall seems to have a pretty detailed idea of what he's planning and i'm honestly sad that he didn't introduce owen's series of live on or put spyfall back to mid series and bring him in for a different premiere sure you might have to lose orphan 55 but who'd miss that overall the reveal of those identity is

6:07 maddening it's done brilliantly it didn't leak so he had no idea but without having seen the backstory between him and the doctor we lose the impact the whole thing is perfectly executed but it's so flawed that it's like a spectacular olympic dive into an empty swimming pool i love that the master is a tissue compression eliminator again so much more interesting than a [ __ ] laser screwdriver and it's proof that you don't need to reinvent the wheel what came before and make it cool because the chances are what you come up with today the laser screwdriver for example won't be as memorable as the thing that has already stood the test of time anyway complaints in part one i noticed a slight issue with timing the doctor takes a tardis to see oh the master who's in hiding alone in the outback but when she arrives he already

6:53 has the australian secret service with them and they're there to look after him the doctrine ryan o is in the middle of the great victoria desert which is 163 thousand square miles unless a doctor sent a message to the australian government telling them where he was and then went on a weekend break there is no way those agents should have arrived first and another complaint mi6 has never countenanced the possibility of extraterrestrial life see this is one of the problems with new who's obsession with setting the show in the modern day in general and the uk in particular it makes everyone dumb this is like bringing the head of security of portland oregon and then have him say that the organization doesn't officially believe in vegans and to compound this oh quit the secret service because no one else took his interest in aliens seriously

7:39 he's collected all sorts of evidence that they exist that might be compelling if alien monsters weren't falling into the sky over london with alarming regularity the show was to have its cake spectacular alien attacks in the modern uk and ed have characters who react like regular people and be incredulous when aliens are manchanned the monsters are some of the best looking who history and that sounds much more like an insult than intended their first appearance taking the look of whatever they passed through was like a much more well-realized version of the 3d boneless from flatline honestly i'm shocked that the doctor didn't comment on it and their white energy look is simple but brilliantly realized their weirdly shaped heads look a bit like the voord from classic who but spoilers they're not they're the cassavan who've never been seen or heard from since you know

8:25 the special effects in chimney's era continue to be a massive improvement of the previous years except when the slimfast docks are involved and on to part two imaginably called spyfall part two it starts with dram on the plane as the doctor ever a plane journey that went normally how much longer doctor i don't know i think we're almost there where are we just where you thought we were captain heathrow some 140 million years ago

9:12 uh apparently not spyfall part two reminds me of the second half of a series nine moffatt two-parter rather than two parts of a single big story it goes off in an unexpected 90 degree angle with the leaping through history and throwing in notable historical figures i'm not complaining though i much prefer that to the spy pastiche and it's more success for the much a series nine though part of me wishes they could just handle the problem of the doctor being stuck in the past without the tardis by having a remember that one of her past selves was in the area in about a week and could catch a left all we'd need is the tardis materializing in the present 13 leaves and thanks for past self for the lift and the cup of tea and we have a voice from the inside the tardis as the doors close a new line from colin or sylvester or a sample from a dead classic doctor saying bye bye

9:57 it'll be simple and a beautiful subversion of expectations the forest of null space is pretty cool looking in the swooping long shots but suffers when they become close-ups it's both a far superior version of the planet of evil's jungle sit and basically the same thing as it depending on the shot i'm damning with faint praise again but planet of evil's jungle was considered one of the best sets ever done in the 70s i really like it i love lice's depiction it's not just because the actor playing her sylvie briggs is quite a good likeness her characterization is very her from her introduction where she apologizes for being afraid to are being as rational as possible and all the weird stuff lovelace's dad was lord byron after he left his family to port around with his sexy goth friends her mom blamed his passionate artist for this and so raised

10:43 aida to the opposite of her dad she learned the signs his logic reason and art and emotion were minimized if you want a pithy description ada lovelace was raised via georgian vulcan and this scientific background is why she became the first computer programmer working for charles babbage inventor the difference anjan arguably the first true computer now onto the weird subject of her surname the episode thinks it was gordon do you understand her miss gordon no sing the least mr babbage when it wasn't and she had a few over the years her maiden name was byron like her dad and when she married her surname became king and she became the countess of lovelace hence ada lovelace though her first name was actually augusta she was named after her dad's sister who he

11:29 might have had an affair with yes what he what the episode is set in 1834 the year before she married so should be ada byron i can only guess that someone didn't want to cause confusion with her dad who turns up 18 years earlier in a few episodes time oh no i've gone cross-eyed charles babbage also turns up with the unfinished different sanjan a machine designed to do equations a calculator it would never be completed in his lifetime but was later finished and it worked meaning he was nearly literally ahead of his time honestly it was kind of wasted in this episode ada lovelace also didn't have enough screen time but babbage was really short changed with only a brief appearance pointing at the difference engine being

12:15 a bit sexist and that was it the two of them really deserve a whole story with steampunk cyberman spy newer khan is also a cool figure to include though again i feel she's been short-changed i mean here we have a british woman spy born in moscow to an indian father an american mother fighting for the french resistance she's an allied mad libs she was a sophia and like most sufis was a pacifast but put her ideals to one side to join the woman's auxiliary air force and then the soe in occupied france she was primarily a wireless operator it doesn't sound as dangerous as some jobs but the life expectancy was about six weeks khan was eventually betrayed and died in dachau she really should be more well known than she is pill her whole family should be more well known her dad introduced sufism to the west and two of

13:01 her younger siblings were now sufi scholars a bit of a tangent after all the history stuff but i love the villain's explanation of how the companions can't just go off grid go on go off grid see how long you last it was like a point-by-point explanation of why the doctor martha and jack going off the grid in the sound of drums was dumb and i love dad anyway on to the complaints it's kind of crazy that graham hears the master say that he knew the doctor when she was a man he said that he knew the doc when she was a man and instead of assuming that she's trans he instead remembered the first night they met ages ago when the clearly unbalanced doctor mentioned regeneration she told me and grace that she'd been through um regeneration a whole body had changed and he assumes that's what the master is talking about i can't tell if he said

13:48 his mind expanded by the alien stuff can't conceive of judy whitaker being trans or it's just a bit of hackneyed writing it's probably all three i'm not a fan of the master's perception filter that makes the nazis think he's white it's unnecessary on two levels one the master is a master of disguise it's one of his main gimmicks just give him a rubber mask and two he's the master and convincing the nazis to work for him brown or not it's not the silliest thing it's been involved in even this episode having said that i love that the doctors turned off the filter and laughed assuming the master would probably survive i mean he once survived being burned alive on screen some pissed off nazis are nothing this story can easily be viewed as chibinaldon cover versions or russell the davies cover version in part one

14:34 kind of summing up both russell's love of modern stuff and pastiche and as steven moffatt cover in part two with all the scattergun but clever storytelling across multiple threads hell the whole end of part two from the master spending 77 years in the slow path to the doctor going back and setting up his defeat to the doctor going even further back and setting up the companion survival in the plane was pure curse of the fatal death the comedy episode moffatt wrote back in the 90s so overall i quite liked these two even though they were basically cover versions of the last two guys in charge more than 55 is basically a love letter to early 80s who the settings like leisure hive the makeup and hyphen with the three is straight to the lion guys and warrior's gate it feels cheap whitaker is scripted a slightly tom bakery sometimes suck your thumb until

15:21 the hallucinations stop and remember they're not real bats the sets look a bit 80s the green hair is pure cheap alien design it's all about a sparkler exterior being pulled away revealing the dark truth and overall it's not good hell the monsters are basically eddie's classic who creatures fighting quick shots but clearly cheap and [ __ ] if you see them for any length of time not to be mistaken for 70s classical creatures who didn't even look fun and quick shots good grief it's a stegosaurus or 60's classic who creatures who generally looks great because black and white hit a [ __ ] with special effects problems why did kane build the resort on a planet with dangerous native life you're

16:07 using environmental shields and fake vistas and also not built in on a planet without life it's space according to the drake equation there's a lot more planets without life than with that yeah she plans on terraforming the planet but you can do that to a dead planet and not be eating the attempt yeah kane's kind of dumb but this is more than dumb it's terrible business if the planet had to be earth for narrative reasons then she should have had a proper reason for putting the resort there preferably a non-stupid one though i can't think of one and it's not like they had to choose this planet because of its location they're teleporting people in from far and wide the guests don't even know where they are okay someone's gonna point out that an orphan planet is stated to be a planet that can no longer support life because of the actions of the species that lived there i know that but the

16:53 planet is clearly not lifeless there are trees even if the monsters hid the trees can't they go out in a mission to try and rescue the old men taken by the monsters it's it's kind of like an attempt to do something like the mission into the hive and aliens but aliens were smart enough to not have all the marines bring all the civilians with them oh wait sorry it did okay aliens are smart enough to not knock them out of the [ __ ] apc this is probably a budget or time issue they either couldn't afford a whole team of security characters so they had to use everyone else or they could but there wasn't time to the store they wanted with two sets of characters security and civilians in a single part story if they cut the civilians to make this make sense they'd lose the spin of the episode the sparrow trade so we end up with civilians being shoehorned into

17:40 what should be the security people's job narratively it's a bit like the arc from classic who when they couldn't afford a brig scent so the villains had to imprison people in security kit chan take them away for the security kitchen anyway the former human monster things are said to be apex predators technically that's probably true but they seem to be the only animal life in the planet so that feels like cheating i'm not sure where the monsters the dregs even began attacking the dome they're basically animals and to them as a pile of metal it's a weird mountain bella caine's daughter brought down the security systems for reasons but i don't think she actually signaled the dregs to attack if she did then she's gone from ridiculously unsympathetic and responsible for a lot of people's deaths to the real villain and responsible for

18:25 a lot of people's deaths and at some point they're stopping an even-handed review and just start into a stream of consciousness pile of complaints but in that spirit i preferred the alien planet that was secretly earth all along and they discovered via subway idea when it was in the sixth doctor's mysterious planet according to all the records this is robologs well how do you explain this unless of course perhaps they collected railway stations they start running out of oxygen and the doctor begins collapsing first it's a bit weird seeing as one of the doctors fun little time lord biological quirks is a respiratory bypass system that allows you to operate without breathing for much longer than a human sure this could be a long forgotten and obscure piece of old who nonsense but

19:12 it's also been used in smith and jones deep breath mummy the art express and oxygen but on the subject of oxygen there's a lot of fires burning in the monster high which is weird because there's not much oxygen there it's kind of an important plot point now the good stuff i love the viruses affecting ryan and i'm glad this show's still wearing its politics in its sleeve even when it's incredibly unsubtle about it unless people face facts and change catastrophe is coming but it's not decided this speech in universe is probably bollocks by the way not that she's wrong she's not but the future probably is set the curse of fenrik already showed us future humans heavily mutated by being trapped in a pollution planet probably the midpoint

19:57 between now and orphan 55 and fixed points in time happen a lot in new who earth's future and doctor who is long and storied it's invaded abandoned recolonized dragged across cosmos for the time lords becomes a blooded nightmare world humans evolve into the forms of life multiple times a lot can and does happen between now and near five billion in some thing honestly i think the ending is a doctor trying to make them feel better i mean a recurring thing in series 12 is the doctor being bummed up by the destruction of gallifrey and if this doesn't have to earth's fate then logically that doesn't have to be gala phrase and yet she clearly thinks that it is anyway i'm not a fan of orphan 55 i don't hate it like a lot of people do it's just a bit crap and often not very well thought out i don't think i'll do 20 who but it's a

20:43 possibility nikola tesla's night of terror features the other timeless doctor because the guy who played tesla was in timeless and he played a doctor in er [ __ ] hilarious goran difficult to pronounce second name comes from the same basic area as tesla and they both spent a few decades in the usa there are no video or audio recordings of tesla so his performance is probably as close as we're ever going to get how the guy really was a world wireless system a way for each of us to reach beyond our immediate sphere into every corner of the earth there is a lot to like here i love that this story revels in and even uses the semi-obscure history of the current war and the other eccentric stuff that surrounded tesla there's a reason to become a science meme robert

21:29 glenister is playing thomas edison he's interesting because he's one of the few actors to bring classic who knew who and big finish here's one of the caves of andres annie one of the best stories of the 80s and as edison it's like he's doing a john voigt impression there's a british accent isn't it yes now there's a country who's never understood business the line is mind-blowingly stupid capitalism was invented by a british person in britain this is set in 1903 the uk is still the dominant country in the world and they violently exported capitalism all over the place the idea that the uk is less business-ish than the usa is from the mid-20th century and later when post-war the uk got that dose of socialism that the conservatives are still trying to operate there's a british accent isn't it yes

22:14 now there's a country who's never understood business apart from that edison was earlier talking to the doctor and graham before who both are british accents why is he suddenly surprised to hear a british accent the episode actually depicts the basics of the edison tesla relationship tesla was an eccentric genius with few people skills and wasn't good at business while edison was the opposite a businessman who could manipulate people and was nowhere near scientifically clever as tesla an unpleasant guy but not a monster man just didn't understand the american sense of humor all those men worked for me they had families i had dinner with this guy and his wife last week i have to tell her the main historical problem is that dorothy tesla secretary didn't start working for him until about

23:00 a decade later there is a very particular error to most of the celebrities turning up this series edison and tesla in this lovely some babbage and spyfall and the village adata team later on it's like this series drew up a short list of people that you would expect to turn up in doctor who already and found guest spots for about half of them i'm guessing the other half including h.p lovecraft andy warhol leonardo da vinci and hedy lamarr my main complaint about this episode is the skithera knock off the rachnos or the baddies they're effective when they're killing people and wearing their appearance like a cheap suit but when we see the true cells it's much worse to this one way over paid for i mean these are worse than the rack nose and they were [ __ ] to begin with why does the queen look like a human how does this

23:45 look worse than the generic cgi scorpions why did ronnie from the surgeon adventures get dragged into this ronnie was awesome just bring her back and to make it worse the skitherer are just a packless and star trek they collect equipment from other species that they can't make themselves and then they kidnap an engineer to help them run everything we are packlets we look for things things that make us go and seeing as everything on their ship is red that means their primary moody defense we have crimson force field no the crimson force field has disarmed us they are smart everything the skithera touches turns to [ __ ] including a mostly good historical wrongful minutiae series 12 is continuing series 11's tendency to drop real information into the scraps going back to the show's original

24:32 perfume being semi-educational and this one doesn't more than most it's full of little details with tesla and edison including stuff there's no bearing on the plot it didn't need to mention that tesla often didn't write stuff down but kept in his head but it did and now more people know about that hell the whole finale was based around the weird electrical storm caused by tesla when he activated his wardence facility one night you see tesla didn't feel like explaining to his workers what he was doing and why i love to tesla wanted to have a better look at the tardis very in character you have to let me study that machine of yours it is by far the most magnificent invention i've ever seen in my life now this is probably just coincidence but in his youth tesla believed women were superior to man but later on decided that women had

25:17 fallen by trying to be like man trying to take over and be dominant so if you want you could view that as an older tesla bitter and disappointed after so many defeats looking back and getting pissed off with the doctor for not letting him check out the tardis which would have guaranteed his success anyway this is a solid episode apart from the [ __ ] skidra the worst realized doctor who monsters in literally years next is fugitive of the jedoon and i won't even try to keep spoilers though the show successfully did which is a [ __ ] miracle when you think about it joe martin is my favorite new doctor and she is the best new doctor outfit and i will fight you on that she's haughty stern condescending cold and her costume is a perfect mix of classical and eccentric i've wanted a new who doctor like that since it starred we came closest a

26:05 couple of times but she's spot on i don't think i've ever seen a new doctor establish themselves so quickly and so well since heart and all even trouting objectively the best doctor didn't really crystallize as a second doctor for a couple of stories apart from loving the performance and the look how i feel about the so-called fugitive doctor will depend on what's revealed about her in the future because as far as i can tell there are big and are small problems slaughtering anywhere in the doctor line up here are the possibilities one she's pre-heart null this is impossible she has a police box that happened in the first episode it's still a police box why hasn't it changed two she slots in between two and three this is less impossible because never saw two become three and she wouldn't be the first

26:50 attempt to sneak a hidden incarnation in there if we take series 6b into account series 6b was a fan theory that so nearly explained so many continuity [ __ ] ups that as we accept is basically canon it postulated that the second doctor was grabbed before his execution and was pressed into service for the time lord secret service what's it do he keeps the time lord's dual control infernal cheek i shall complain when this is over so if we take series 6b into account this could explain whether judeon jeduna after her the second doctor broke free the time lord's control and he became joe martin at some point i mean the jedina are literally working for a time lord so eventually the time lords catch up screw with her memory and complete the execution into pertway leaving the newly regenerated third

27:36 doctor on earth in the 70s or 80s but that's a whole other continuity snarl but why they'd remove her memories i have no idea they're being a fugitive incarnation before three actually answers a question when did three learn venusian aikido one and two never use it neither seems to the type to learn martial arts but three knew it from the start joe martin's doctor uses venues in nikita when running for a lie seems to be a good reason to learn at the main problems with slaughtering her in between two and three are that a she seems unfamiliar with a sonic screwdriver two was the first doctor to use it what's that it's a sonic screwdriver never fails well this could be just her not recognizing a more advanced model b this would mean that 10 would have been the last incarnation on 11. unless there's a massive upset coming i don't

28:22 see that's possible it'll be the third possibility is that she's a future doctor this is directly contradicted by a lot of the dialogue but that's never stopped doctor who before as much as i think it would make the most sense if she slaughtered him between two and three i get the feeling she's pretty heart and all but i'd be [ __ ] delighted if she somehow turns out to be 14. it was a stroke of genius bringing jack back and the same story is introduced in the fugitive doctor because of the smaller secret jack got revealed it would mean people were distracted from the bigger secret the fugitive doctor it kinda reminded me of the wrath of can apparently word had got out that spock was going to die in the film so they added a brief moment to the kobayashi maru sequence where spock seems to die the reasoning was that people who saw the spoiler would assume that was his death and be shocked at the end of the film when he actually died so

29:08 people who hear that there's a shocking guest star in the episode see jack another guard down and got surprised with the actual twist everything surrounding the episode like keeping the secrets was just masterful i am in awe play the episode itself is fairly meh i mean it has good bits they're just mostly joe martin's doctor but apart from her seeing jack again is a delight though the performance seems a bit off or maybe it's just barriman's more theatrical performance style that meshed so well with the cartoon of your earlier years of new who coming off as a bit weird when paired with more naturalistic filming and performance as the whitaker era i also like the new who roundel mirror in the start lovely subtle foreshadowing anyway this isn't great but it's a must watch and for now

29:54 the possibilities it's raised are really exciting but don't worry i'm sure i'll be crushingly disappointed if and when we find out what exactly is going on the main problem with praxis is finding stuff to talk about it's fine it's competent nothing to run to rave about it's just kind of there repeating the aesop from orphan 55 but less bluntly so we have a space virus called praxis that's using birds and microplastics to kill people via this ironically the episode first aired just as the covert 19 pandemic was kicking off which apparently led some people to assume that the praxis virus was inspired by it some people don't know how long it takes to make a tv show but it is a weird coincidence

30:40 i think the best stuff in this is locations it would have been so easy to set this in the uk but they spend some money and it's a properly international story for no reason whatsoever good work the deaths of those infected by praxis have some great effects it kind of reminds me of the tooth monster from channel zero my only complaint is that the bodies disintegrate like vampires in a tanning salon the the villain's motivations were good too unique and sympathetic she's from an alien planet where apraxia's evolved and it's slowly been killing her species so she's unleashed on earth gonna spit up a look at what it does and possibly use that to find a cure and this is a real thing minus the alien plastic virus stuff a disease that's established tends to be less fatal to the group regularly exposed to add this is a mix of it

31:26 evolving not to kill the host and the host developing some kind of immunity to add but if a disease is new like praxis is on earth then there's a bunch of hosts who've never come into contact with anything like it before and it can spread like wildfire and be just as devastating just look at what happened when white people arrived in the americas it's kind of sad that the most memorable thing about an episode is that it does a fair job of showing how viruses can work and then hilariously it has the alien scientist trying to find a cure for paraxias forget that humans and her species have different biologies and not realize that a cure for humans doesn't mean a cure for her she died like the idiot she was painfully anyway some minor good stuff

32:12 it was fun to see yes be the doctor with their own companion for a while especially after the last episode when 13 was briefly the fugitive doctor's companion i know this has been done before by clara and flatline but it's a little less cringe-worthy here and the bed the travel vlogger got over the death of a partner very quickly but being a youtuber that's truth and television we are a fickle and evil lot i'm not fond of ryan being told to dissect the bird because he'd done it in school i'm pretty sure that's not done in uk schools anymore i mean i'm older than ryan and i went to a british school and it definitely wasn't a thing when i was younger if anyone should have been told to dissect it it should have been graham his generation definitely dissected staff or one of the scientists could have done it just an idea

32:57 anyway this is fine very little to complain about next is can you hear me it's the latest appearance by ian gelder he played the magic rags in the ghost monument i was impersonated by dalkin resolution and as far as i can tell has an annual contract with doctor who under chris chibnall and i do like this form it's so small i'm not complaining though he has a cool voice he's playing zelen a godlike being causing trouble by the power of nightmares but he's only the flashy bad guy the real villains are existential depression and self-doubt and this terrible cgi seriously this looks awful it's like it's escaping the eccles in our talent era i'm baffled the show's been doing so well with cgi recently all three of the companions are left home and split up for the day as a break from

33:44 the traveling which lets them all ruminate on stuff and in chibnall's who a thinking companion is an unhappy companion i'm not exactly complaining though it feels pretty real for people who are constantly in life or death situations to do some introspection when they finally get a chance to stop running anyway ryan's stuff would have worked so much better if we knew the friend they went to visit hell it should have been his dad anything really other than a random guy that we're expected to care about because ryan knows him it also shouldn't have set up what appears to be a guy going through a really dark patch ruined flat isolated etc and instead of something real it's just nightmares the guidance in your dreams is in your room let's applaud to gerald's game and then you'd laugh yeah the nightmares are part of the monster plot but with him it doesn't work it's evoking serious real world

34:29 stuff like social anxiety and depression but rather than actually doing that even in a veiled way he's just reacting to nightmares which is cheap even if the nightmares are caused by the scary alien dude with the detachable fingers the big question is why ryan's friends getting the nightmares at all yeah as in graham we're also getting weird visions from the scary alien dude during the same time ryan does get a nightmare but only after he's arrived on the ship with the others so the very weird conclusion i have to come to is that the scary alien guy somehow got ryan and his friend mixed up this sort of nonsense is kind of endemic to the episode it has a half-hearted dream logic that's hard to tell apart from [ __ ] ups and the writing i'm being harsh but i generally like the episode i mean it features the doctor coming face to face with the villain zelen

35:16 and then doing the 10 thing of nonsensically defeating the bad guy if i had not very well explained means but then it suddenly turned back on her she didn't stumble into a random powerful being who's all evil and stuff and then defeats him using hand with you [ __ ] he did stuff to get her attention because he wanted her to do the things that she thought would defeat him it's nicely churning one of new who's most annoying tropes on its head zilla name drops much of all too powerful higher beings the sort of things that were ignored by russell the davies and moffat's efforts to turn the doctrine to the highest authority we get mentions of the eternals the guardians and the celestial toymaker which is nice it's been too [ __ ] long since the doctor came face to face with beings like a killer with a thought and if done well it forces the writer to put some extra effort in unfortunately this isn't the

36:02 script for that for instance when the doctor gets trapped in nightmare by the nightmare-based higher beings all she does is not like the nightmare enough to wake up and then do the physically impossible to escape so how do you defeat to rampaging immortals answer you don't can you defeat us there you who has been a career defeating rampaging people who are varying degrees who are mortal you know the villain's evil plan is kind of pointless honestly they eventually decide to spend eternity on earth feeding the nightmares of the human race which is going to do what exactly because people are going to get nightmares regardless i'm not seeing a change in the status quo zillion originally planned on feeding in all their nightmares at once killing everyone on earth in the feed but his partner wants to take it slow and just do regular feeding and there's no

36:49 indication that it harms the people that they feed on one we have so much time to walk in their nightmares this is more that half-hearted dream logic meets bad reading stuff i was talking about but like i said earlier i generally like this episode it was unusual and kind of existential and when the story logic worked it was pretty cool so here's some stuff i liked the animation showing zelen and his counterparts origin is really wonderful it reminds me of the 80s hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy or hedwig and the angry inch the gods set to their games so in chaos through the populations wars began that speech could easily have just been dialogue but they took the extra effort and it's great i love the alien computer controlled by a laser harp all too often

37:34 sci-fi just assumes that technology has to look like what we have or hasn't got the imagination to think of anything different so i appreciate that they did something different i also like to hear i'd love a historical companion both ruther the davies and steven moffat decided to do one but changed their minds because of scripting challenges which is also why classic who killed off the companion katarina from ancient troy four episodes after she joined the tardis crew ironically a lot of who writers seem to lack historical imagination but it's a small thing but i like that in this episode we discover that the doctors installed evil detecting lights in the tardas the episodes continued of extra info inserted in as the doctor explains that in the middle ages the islamic world was medically years ahead of the christian west this must be one of the

38:20 oldest hospitals in the world of course islamic physicians were known for the enlightened way they treated people with mental health problems it's done pretty clumsily here but i still like the approach it reminds me of how colin baker would add big words to his lines every so often to encourage the kids watching to look them up in the dictionary and expand their vocabulary his tendency to do this resulted in one of my favorite stories from azera though i don't know if it's apocryphal or not and frankly it's so hilarious i don't really care in time lash the doctor affairs to the evil attacker as a microcephalic apostate you gave me your word you microcephalic apostate and paul darrow who played taker was so thrown to the lion change that he replied with what did you say about my dick and finally one element that i kind of like and hate at the same time is a

39:06 doctor talking to herself without the others there to impress you guys go this way oh who am i supposed to share all the interesting stuff with one of the theories i quite like about the doctors so the main reason they have human companions is because they're so easily impressed so i like this nod to that pity was done with the subtlety of a sledgehammer words next is the haunting of villa dia data a wonderful setting for a historical five of the early 19th century's bright young things alone together during a haunted summer gothic the [ __ ] out of each other basically lord byron father vader lovelace was in self-imposed exile in switzerland with his physician dr polidori when they were visited by the shelleys percy and mary and claire claremont mary's half-sister one of byron's many unhappy ex as it was

39:52 1816 the year without a summer a volcano in indonesia had messed up the planet's atmosphere tan and the gang spent the time discussing signs taking drugs [ __ ] and reading ghost stories the visit directly led to the creation of modern vampire fiction and frankenstein and through frankenstein arguably the entire genre of sci-fi frankly i'm shocked that it took this long for this story to happen in the tv show mary shelley was a companion of the eighth doctor and other stories no i've seen three wildly different dramatizations of these events and cybermen are not this is far from the most ridiculous one that's gothic it's just wow [Music]

40:47 this music's really hard to take the movie blinded me with nonsense it blinded me with nonsense and my head's full of ache you know the previous story ended with the doctor telling the rest of the team that she's going to take them to see frankenstein i was thinking frankenstein what did i interrupt my interrupting it would have been hilarious to subvert everyone's expectations by going to see johann dipal a 17th century alchemist and alleged anatomist who lived in castle frankenstein in germany and claimed to have invented the elixir eternal life using a cybermen as the inspiration for frankenstein is a great idea so great it's exactly what happened in the eighth doctor's stories they mentioned before

41:33 though i really feel it should have been a 10th planet style cyberman rather than one of the metal mickeys visually all the guest actors are good matches for the actual poets i mean compare these paintings against the people who played the parts in haunted summer and gothank doctor who did a much better job maxim baldry as polidori in particular is almost a dead ringer for the real guy the poet's personalities are generally pretty historically accurate too though rather pg-rated byron in particular has been toned way down in the latching department they're also missing as a limp he had a badly deformed foot in real life and regardless what the episode's ending thinks he was not the sort to cower and then proceeded to use my person as a human shield and byron traveled to greece and spent

42:19 much of his fortune funding a rebellion against the ottoman empire byron was a great many bad things but a coward was not one of them it's pretty interesting that the story seems to feature actual ghosts the mysterious servants were never explained and guessing there was at one point a line explaining that there were side effects the weirdness caused with a long cyberman he's the villain his real name is ashad and he continues the new who tradition of having a single enemy be far more impressive than a group like the dalek and dalek or the cyber head of the pandorica opans though is also so ridiculously evil that he's basically supervan i know that's a weird complaint to have out of dr who villain but he so hated being a human that he volunteered for cyber conversion and probably before that he slit his own children's throats for opposing them and

43:06 i did have children i slit their throats when they joined the resistance so he's not just a super villain he's an edgy 90s dork aged super villain all he needs are tiny feet and a ludicrous amount of pouches i really think a shad would have worked better if he was an innocent being driven by programming that he hated and was terrified of slowly becoming the deranged thing he was here it'd fit the inspiring frankenstein thing better and be a little less one note though as notes go he is pretty when they memorable the resistance i quite like the doctor's rant but saving shelley his thoughts his words inspire and influence thousands for centuries if he dies now who knows what damage that will have on

43:53 future history the world you came from the world you were created in won't exist so neither will you it kind of reminded me of four taking sarah jane to see her earth destroyed when she suggests ducking into the fight against sutek and the pyramids of mars it's a trick that's the world a sutek would leave it desolate planet circling a dead sun in a way this is part one of the three-part finale it's the best part and let's just say that it goes into interesting places that are gonna be plenty to talk about the penultimate episode of the series is called the ascension of the cybermen and that is a great lead into the intro now this and the next story the timeless children are heavily interconnected so i'm going to try and keep them separate but there's going to be some bleed through between them and i'll try not to

44:39 repeat myself i do enough of that in these videos so um [ __ ] ten the looms are cool the doctor doesn't have sex and yeah i think i'm gonna hate you [Applause] [Music] there's two stories in this episode the main one with the doctor and the crew helping some human refugees survive against the cyberman in the last days the cyber war it's a war with cyber the shed from the last episode has taken the silvery goo that he forced the doctor to give him and he's going to do some weird things with that and the second story is about brendan a baby found in rural ireland adopted by a local family he becomes a garda irish police and

45:24 discovers that he's invincible and when he retires he finds the people in nunes youth are alive and young again and he's getting mind-wiped this is possibly the most obscure in-joke in the show's history ireland in these scenes is a heavily reimagined version of galifrey a recurring joke in classic who and once a new who is people hearing about this place called gallifrey and assuming that it's in ireland the guard or the cia the timeless ticket service the celestial intervention agency though they're called the division in this and i'll explain who brendan is in the finale but if you're watching this you probably already know to add another sillier level to this gallery ireland thing ko sharmas guardian of the portal to safety away from the cyber minutes played by ian michael henney at least a

46:09 gal of three but michael henney also put the grandfather in dairy girls so clearly the portal is actually going to deray which is in ireland because ireland is girl afraid i'm sorry there's not much i can talk about in this episode without going into the important stuff for the series finale i suppose i could discuss the cyber war though for much but it's more like a cyber pub argument at the start of the episode there's seven humans and three cybermen forgive me but i feel a war needs to involve slightly more people than barely double digits to count at least in classic who scripted stuff that couldn't possibly afford like an army of daleks they use hilarious cutouts to increase the numbers but towards the end of the episode we see with these corners being cut they came up with a new cyberman design that's three designs in 13 seasons sounds excessive but there was a

46:55 period of about a decade when classic who would heavily redesign the cybermen in just about every appearance they made my main complaint about the new design is the only good new whose cyberman design is the recreated 10th planet version it'll be part of a shad's evil plan is to help the cybermen ascend this involves taking a drill and giving them an upgrade they'll never forget carrying a cyberman that makes other cybermen scream this guy is not all bad he's killing cybermen much more efficiently than we ever did anyway guest stars the shads played by patrick o'kane an underused and intense as [ __ ] actor who looks like he's been grown in a van to play bastards you might have seen him in game of thrones or my sunset heights review apart from him there's michael henney

47:42 who looks happy to be involved and who is she she reminds me of someone oh [ __ ] this is going to drive me mad wild who is it who is she [ __ ] this is pointless might as well be kicking bones oh wait she's a hot baldwin from preaching to the perverted near the start of the episode we have the cyber drones flying murder heads they're the latest in a long line of justly forgotten cybermen variants that knew who has come up with like the cybershades and the cyberking not the cyberplanner or cybermats though they were classical i could kinda see the points of the drones that they grabbed a hold of a victim by their head and threw them back to base for cyber conversion but even that'd be dumb as [ __ ] anyway the episode ends with the tardis who separated the light years a shot ascending the cyberman whatever that

48:28 means and the master stepping through coast sharma's portal welcoming the doctor to the finale be afraid doctor because everything is about to change is he though and now the timeless children the least controversial episode and doctor who history go to lawrence gentlemen this has two main sections both of which annoyed a lot of people in one we have yet more cyber nonsense that the budget can't really handle and on the other the master gives chibnall's very detailed explanation of the morbius doctors from the ruins of a redestroyed galafrey look upon my work doctor and despair uh master are you aware that lione ozymandias is an ironic monument to his failure ye mighty saws works and

49:13 they crumbled everyone uses this line unironically because it sounds cool look on my wax you're mighty and despair but it's like quoting the punchline to a joke and taking it seriously muzzymandius was written by percy shelley because it vilidata ada lovelace and a shad are a spiderweb of overlapping references that signify nothing i actually hate this episode less than most loud opinionated [ __ ] online but i really do hate the master destroying galafrey because that just means the timeless degeneration from techno gods some idiots and silly hats reached a zenith the master never even managed to properly wipe out humanity but he manages with the time lords i mean yeah the earth is the doctor defending it a time lord but girl afraid probably is more than one of them beyond

49:59 that i'm firmly the opinion that the master should have ended up in gallifrey in some position of power for having defeated rasulullah in the end of time the master as lord president hunting down the doctor for the crime of attempting to destroy gallifrey in the time war would have really worked his applaud but now we get a force awakens last jedi rise of skywalker thing between russell moff and chibnall over whether gallifrey's annihilated or not [ __ ] choose one one thing that really amuses me is the loud people who are confident that the timeless child makes no sense and [ __ ] up canon because it reminds me of the end of narnia and those fans usually new who fans who don't know much about the show before are the white witch yelling about deep magic while chibnall whose aslan drops some even deeper magic on them because like it or not the timeless child has some major roots in doctor who

50:46 roots that are older than most people listening to that and personally i'm not a massive fan i see this as a not very good version of something that i like like a perfectly sculpted replica of the venus de milo made it a rotting meat but you cannot argue that chibnall doesn't know as who well you can but it would be dumb and with the deep magic behind the timeless child and the last day is a classic who there were some references to the doctor being involved in the creation of time lord society alongside rasolon and omega obviously that didn't line up with the doctor earlier being [ __ ] terrified of rastalone and generally being unimpressed by omega but in the books that came after the 1989 cancellation it was revealed that the doctor was a reincarnation of the other and had recovered his memories at some point wrestling omega and the other get it

51:32 they discovered regeneration time travel and created the eye of harmony the black hole that powers a civilization omega was lost in his effort to create the eye rasalon became galifrey's dictator until he was eventually overthrown and locked in his tower in the death zone and the other counted suicide by throwing himself into the looms the limbs were how the gallifriends reproduced some genetic material would be taken from every member of a family and then they'd be weaved into a new family member a new cousin it was created to explain why the doctor being asexual and a romantic and classic who not really necessary but it is a very interesting sci-fi idea in a way the other threw himself into the looms and was later reborn as the doctor and susan well she's the other's granddaughter one of the last galaphrones born before the invention of

52:17 the looms she met the dutch when he traveled to the gal for his past and she recognized him as her grandfather some of this madness was due to be revealed in series 26 of classic who in the story long barrow which was eventually rewritten into ghost ghostlight longboro was the doctor's family home in gallifrey and that story eventually resurfaces a novel also called longbow now i really like the other the looms the whole deal and as far as i'm concerned it's canon and chivnal chibnall's a long-term doctor who fan so i'm pretty sure he's taken some inspiration from the other or the stuff on tv that led into that but the original inspiration for the timeless child was clearly the morbius doctors in the braid of morbius the doctor is a psychic duel with the evil timelord morbius and we see these earlier incarnations the intention at the time

53:03 was that these were preheartenal faces but then the five doctors retconned hartnell as the first doctor and most people assumed that these faces were morbias as it happens i am the doctor the original you might say but now they've been re-retconned as pre-heart no face as so yes the timeless child is a retconne but it's also retconned over retconned ovaret khan in a way brandon the guard is one of the doctors previous alives the memories had a filter placed on it in the matrax the matrix of the digital reality where timeless upload their memories and stuff it first appeared in the 70s but for some reason it was decided that the filter of an early 20th century irish policemen made the memories more anonymous when they're among the

53:49 memories of millions of time lords this is like trying to disguise a notable barista among a large collection of other baristas but dressing them up like a klingon i'm kind of undecided about how i feel about the master using the matrix to show the dark to the backstory on the one hand it's the matrix it kind of makes sense but it's also goofy as [ __ ] like a slasher villain with a ready-made slideshow to explain why they're killing people though that is totally the sort of thing the anthony master would have done peoples of the universe please attend carefully the message that follows is vital to the future of you all the story is just so into listening to the master explain [ __ ] that after he kills a shad which was hilariously out of nowhere but perfectly in character the siberian the weird silver stuff just floats beside him listening to a

54:35 monologue evilly rather than flying to the nearest viable host which is what it did previously who loves speeches this episode doubly so it's weird to think that the master working with a cyberman in a series finale would have been unique at one point i mean just in the last little while we've had series 8 10 and 12. i didn't think it was possible for something to rival the daleks and overused but jesus i mean two of those feature the assimilation of the dead at a certain point it stops being a narrative and starts being a remax and i would decide i'm going to simulate the dead time lords to create the new race of cyberlords which is possibly the silliest thing i've seen in years and i have seen a lot of silly things and then seconds later it's superseded by the doctor using the power of stock footage and the theme sung to breaker of the matrax

55:30 you know they totally should have stuck photos of russell the davey stephen moffitt and chibnall in there just to [ __ ] with the fans anyway after some more nonsense all life and gallifrey's destroyed again but like that'll stop the master the guy was once trapped in a collapsing universe being torn apart by his own victims after the last exit closed and then he turned up a couple months later without explanation so you escaped from caster valve i should have guessed as gullible as ever my dear doctor he'll be back and hopefully without being recast i do like this one this wasn't a great episode but i was more annoyed with the cyber stuff than the timeless child the timeless child is something i broadly like in a form that i don't the cyber stuff was just a nonsensical mix of a russell the davies finale and a louder more elaborate russell davies

56:16 finale but i did like that unlike russell the davies chibnall went full ridiculous space opera wholly divorced from earth classic who did that all the time and i'm glad we knew who gives it a go even when it's crap anyway the timeless child i do not like the idea that the time lord stole regeneration from elsewhere unless it's a very weird natural thing that makes no [ __ ] sense then someone had to invent it why create a whole other race of uber time lords when you can just make the time lords not [ __ ] but because i'm me i decided to riff on the basic idea of the timeless child and come up with my own alternate versions just to see what people think the process used to recreate regeneration should have tortured and killed the child make time lord civilization literally built on the suffering and death of an innocent child it's kinda ursula kayla guiness and then

57:04 of the master still reformed after the capaldi era discover the still-sentient ghost of that child in the matrix locked in their agonizing moment of death the ghost makes contact with the master joins with them somehow and makes them experience that agony this drives the master to try and end the child's suffering by destroying gal a friend all the time lords help mix this with my master's lord president idea or if you want to be very depressing you could have the doctor somehow being the timelord explorer who found the child and the master was the child and this is payback on the person who built a civilization on his pain and then spent lifetimes lecturing among good and evil admittedly this would be very hard to fit into continuity but this is new who that's never the primary concern i'm

57:49 only 900 years old now untie me at once when you say 900 years that's my age anyway you might not like the stuff chidwell's doing i'm not in love with the timeless child story arc but at the very least it seems that he spent a lot of time planning it out probably literally decades and it does fit into continuity except why did the doctor die in earlier episodes most memorably in turn left did the water extinguish the regeneration but apart from that and anything i didn't think of it fits pretty neatly into continuity and this isn't the end of the story chibnall clearly has more twists coming and if there's one thing that we can pretty much trust is that he's gonna do what he's gonna do so prepare yourself for my craziness and who knows maybe it'll make sense in the end i realize that's unlikely but let's wait and see one of the striking things with

58:36 series 12 is how different it is to

…