In which the Doctor must face the consequences of her actions - and learns a terrible truth about herself and her people in the process...
She and her companions arrive on an alien planet in the far future, in the last days of a new Cyber-war in which the cybernetic creatures have almost entirely wiped out the human race. They have been led to victory by the partly converted Ashad, who now possesses the Cyberium artificial intelligence. He has used his remaining human aspects, combined with Cyberman logic and efficiency, to either destroy or convert the majority of the human race. Only a small group of survivors remain on this world.
Meanwhile, in Ireland of the 1940's, a young farmer named Patrick finds an abandoned baby boy. He brings it home to his wife Meg. A year later, the parents have not been identified and so Patrick and Meg adopt the child, who has been named Brendan. He will be brought up to take over the farm.
On the refugee planet, the Doctor and companions meet the human survivors - leaders Feekat and Ravio and the teenage Ethan, as well as Yedlarmi and his mute younger brother Fuskle, and a girl named Bescot.
The Doctor's attempts to defend the group fail as they come under attack by Ashad and a party of Cybermen, who are armed with Cyberdrones.
Yedlarmi informs Graham and Yaz of a planet named Ko Sharmus which they were making for. There is a phenomenon known as the Boundary situated there - a portal which leads to another part of the cosmos which is free of Cybermen. They decide to make for the planet, knowing that the Doctor will also go there.
She has been told about the Boundary by Ravio and has indeed decided to head there.
In 20th Century Ireland, Brendan has decided to join the local police force - the Garda - instead of taking up a career in farming.
Ashad pursues the two spacecraft.
That containing Yaz and Graham enters a debris field - result of a huge battle. They are running out of power and supplies, but spot a massive abandoned Cybership which has a docking bay open. They use the last of their power to move inside.
In Ireland, Brendan confronts an armed robber on a remote clifftop. The man shoots him and he falls to his death. However, he revives moments later. His father and commanding officer are amazed by this.
The stolen Cybership arrives on Ko Sharmus, and the Doctor discovers that this is not the planet's name at all. Ko Sharmus is actually a person - an old man who lives here alone.
On the abandoned craft, Graham, Yaz and the others discover it to have been a troop carrier and it is full of deactivated Cyber-Warriors. Ashad tracks them down and soon arrives. Bescot is killed as he begins reactivating some of the Warriors. The others seal themselves in the control room.
In Ireland, an elderly Brendan is retiring from the Garda. His father and commanding officer look exactly the same, whilst he has aged. He is taken to a back office and linked up to a machine which delivers an electric shock, removing his memories.
Ko Sharmus takes the Doctor to the Boundary, and explains that it does not always lead to the same location. He has stayed behind to assist as many refugees as possible to escape from the Cybermen. The Doctor warns him that they will be following her.
As they watch, an image of Gallifrey appears beyond the portal.
The Master suddenly emerges...
He takes the Doctor through the Boundary, whilst Ryan and Ko Sharmus must prepare for the arrival of the Cybermen. On the carrier, Yaz and Graham avoid capture by disguising themselves as Cybermen.
They witness Ashad apparently attacking one of his own kind. The craft is then guided towards the planet.
The Doctor is taken by the Master to the ruins of the Capitol where he claims he will tell her why he destroyed Gallifrey. She is trapped by a forcefield as he begins his story.
It transpires that he was able to access a hidden history of their people. The Doctor originally came from another universe. She was found as an abandoned child on a remote planet by a Gallifreyan woman named Tecteun, who witnessed her coming back to life after what should have been a fatal accident. Tecteun experimented on her and discovered that she had the ability to regenerate unlimited times.
These experiments eventually led Tecteun to isolate a genetic code that would allow her and her people to regenerate as well, albeit for a limited number of times. Thus, the Time Lords were born.
Ashad guides the carrier to the planet and Cybermen beam down to attack Ko Sharmus' camp. The old man was actually a commander in the human resistance during the last Cyber-war, and has ensured that the camp has its own defences. It was he who sent the Cyberium back through time to prevent Ashad from obtaining it.
The Cyberman invaders are held back whilst the everyone manages to escape the ship. They all flee through the Boundary to locate the Doctor. The Master, meanwhile, has contacted Ashad and offered him Gallifrey if he follows them.
The Doctor continues to learn about her own history. She was recruited to the organisation known as The Division, which sent her on various missions - which explains the version of herself who had been disguised as Ruth. After each mission, her memories had been wiped. She has lived a multitude of lives prior to what she has always thought to be her First incarnation, but these were all hidden from her.
The Master meets with Ashad after the carrier comes to rest above the Capitol ruins. He learns that Ashad intends to purge the Cybermen of the last vestiges of their previous organic existence, making them purely robotic. He has already converted some of the Cyber-Warriors on the carrier. He possesses within his body a powerful weapon - the Death Particle - capable of destroying all organic life within a wide area.
The Master kills him using his tissue compression eliminator, which leaves the Particle intact. The Cyberium is forced to abandon Ashad - and the Master takes it into himself.
Realising how much more powerful she really is - thanks to the Master - the Doctor is able to escape from the forcefield. He appears in the Panopticon with a new army of Cybermen, created from the corpses of dead Time Lords. These are Cybermen who have the power to regenerate - CyberMasters.
He reveals that he destroyed Gallifrey due to the fact that the Time Lords had lied about their origins, and that everything they were was due to the Doctor. That he owed his existence to her is something he cannot stand.
Learning of the Death Particle, the Doctor realises that she will have to detonate it in order to stop the Master and his CyberMasters from conquering all. This will mean her own death. The Master is almost psychotically suicidal now, urging her to do this. She has sent her companions to a TARDIS for safety. They travel to present day England, where the ship takes on the form of a suburban house.
At the last moment, Ko Sharmus elects to take the Doctor's place. She makes it to another TARDIS in time as the particle destroys the Capitol and the carrier hovering above it.
She travels to collect her own TARDIS, intent on locating the others.
However, the ship is suddenly invaded by Judoon who arrest her - transporting her to a prison in deep space...
Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children were written by Chris Chibnall, and first broadcast on 23rd February and 1st March, 2020.
The story brings the 12th Series to a conclusion, and is arguably the most controversial story to date in the history of the show.
Whilst stories such as The War Games and The Deadly Assassin moved the Doctor's story on, with more background about his / her people, they only introduced new concepts and did not contradict previous facts in any significant way. Each story could be accommodated in the on-going narrative of the series. What Chibnall does is add new background - but at the cost of completely undermining previously established fact.
The seeds of this damage had already been planted with the appearance of the "Fugitive Doctor" earlier in the season, though reference to the "Timeless Child" went right back to The Ghost Monument.
It's always clear that Chibnall made things up as he went along, and lacked any long-term planning (seen most obviously in the way that Yaz will be handled over the course of his remaining episodes). The idea that the rubbishy Remnants - a relatively weak weapon created by a fairly pathetic race - knew about the Doctor's past when no-one else did makes no sense whatsoever.
How could multiple Presidents of the High Council of Time Lords not know any of this?
When Moffat introduced the War Doctor, he could be slotted into the established continuity of the Doctor - basically an incarnation he was ashamed of and sought to suppress from his memories.
Chibnall throws everything out by having the Doctor not even a Time Lord at all, and there were multiple versions prior to the old man we first met in Totter's Lane.
Whilst he could have attempted a ret-con, RTD2 has elected to go with this, so it's something we are now stuck with...
As for the story itself, we see the return of Ashad from the previous episode - making this actually the concluding chapters of a trilogy. The Master returns - how he escaped the Kasaavin dimension unspecified. We learn why he destroyed Gallifrey - but not how. This is quite frustrating as we've seen the planet come under threat before, so it would have been nice to have learned how he finally managed it. As I've mentioned Chibnall has an annoying habit of failing to show us key things.
There's a new Cyberman design, which brings back the classic earmuff design to the helmet. These are Cyber-Warriors - but aren't all Cybermen warriors?
Some of these are converted into CyberMasters, who don't look that great. Why would they retain decorated headgear and wear robes?
The Time Lords also get a subtle makeover - keeping the basic shape of their ceremonial costume but simplifying the look. Another new element, first introduced in Fugitive of the Judoon, is the Division. Again, you have to wonder where they've been throughout the whole of the series history since The War Games. If the Doctor is such a key figure in Time Lord history, why did they let him wander off, repeatedly?
It's all very clumsily tacked on, and fails to integrate in any way with what we have seen before.
Standing out like a sore thumb in the first half is the Irish interlude. It appears that this is some sort of metaphor for the Doctor's time with the Division - or so I thought. However, we then see the scenes again and they are now part of the Matrix flashback sequences, so presumably planted false memories. To be honest, they get in the way of the narrative of the first episode.
There's a large guest cast over these two episodes - but they're mostly wasted. Only Ian McElhinney, as Ko Sharmus, is given anything significant to do. Indeed, he resolves the threat at the conclusion of the story. Let's face it, the Thirteenth Doctor rarely ever actually does anything herself in any of her stories.
The actor is best known for Game of Thrones, and another genre role was the Superman prequel series Krypton.
What might have been a potential love interest for Graham is Julie Graham's Ravio. She previously played the villainous Ruby White in The Sarah Jane Adventures. Ravio is built up in the first half, only to be pretty much ignored in the second part. Indeed, the following Christmas Special will entirely neglect what happened to the refugees who made it to contemporary Earth.
Steve Toussaint's Feekat is killed off fairly quickly. He can be seen in House of the Dragon. Yedlarmi is played by Alex Austin, and Ethan by Matt Carver, who also features in the Game of Thrones prequel series. Again, little is made of their characters once introduced.
Tecteun is Seylan Baxter.
Patrick O'Kane returns as Ashad. He's also rather poorly treated in the second half as the character is very quickly and all too easily bumped off by the Master.
The Irish contingent continues with the characters who only appear in the side-step parts of the first instalment. Brendan is played by Evan McCabe (Berlin Station), and his adoptive father Patrick is Branwell Donaghey (Peaky Blinders, Alien: Prometheus). Caolan Byrne plays the Garda officer.
And Paul Kasey turns up at the end as the Judoon commander.
Overall, like most two-part series finales it kicks off well, despite the initially confusing "Irish interlude", but derails massively in the second half. The Timeless Children is a great episode for Sacha Dhawan, but Whittaker does very little. The Doctor simply spends the episode being told everything by the Master who does all the legwork. As mentioned, the Doctor doesn't even get to resolve the threat.
As for Chibnall's big revelations? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Things you might like to know:
- Ascension of the Cybermen is the seventh penultimate episode of a series to feature Cybermen. And it's the third to have the Master / Missy and Cybermen together.
- In the original draft, it was Yaz who accompanied the Doctor on the stolen Cybership, and Ryan remained with Graham of the ship with Ravio et al.
- The draft also had Ashad originally being the scientist who created the Death Particle - as a form of collective suicide for the last humans should the Cybermen win the war. Once converted, the Cyberium learned of it and sought it as a weapon.
- Apparently the trio of Time Lords we see in the Matrix flashback are supposed to represent Omega and Rassilon, along with a male incarnation of Tecteun. This comes from the 2nd assistant director, who played the Omega figure.
- And Shobogans were the original inhabitants of Gallifrey, before some became Time Lords.
- We see a large number of clips from old episodes - the Hartnell / Troughton ones being colourised. The mental duel with Morbius from The Brain of Morbius obviously plays a big part as it is confirmed on screen that these were previous Doctors.
- Classic stories we see clips from include: An Unearthly Child, The War Machines, The Moonbase, Tomb of the Cybermen, The War Games, Terror of the Autons, Day of the Daleks, The Sea Devils, Carnival of Monsters, Planet of the Spiders, Terror of the Zygons, Pyramids of Mars, The Deadly Assassin, Robots of Death, City of Death, Logopolis, Time-Flight, Arc of Infinity, The Caves of Androzani, Vengeance on Varos, Trial of a Time Lord, Time and the Rani, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and The Curse of Fenric.
- Dhawan was credited on the official website as "Barack Stemis" to conceal his involvement - an anagram of "Master is Back". The character "Stemis" was playing was called "Fakout".
- The man who shoots Brendan is named Michael (played by Andrew Macklin). This was going to be the name of the Garda sergeant, but was then given to the criminal.
- Look closely and you can spot the actor's head when the CyberMaster that regenerates after being shot gets up again.
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