The Faceless Ones - DVD Review

If you look at the big series polls which are conducted every few years, you'll notice how those stories which no longer exist, or which have only the odd orphan episode still in the archives, tend to rate fairly low scores. The only ones that do better are the ones with Daleks or Cybermen in them. The Enemy of the World was always scored low, based on the one episode which existed, plus its reputation as the one without any monsters in the "Monsters" Season 5. Then the missing five episodes were recovered and we got to see that the orphan episode was the weak, atypical one, and the rest of it was really rather good. The story shot up the ratings back in 2014, the last time we had a DWM poll.
No such poll has been conducted since the generally overlooked The Macra Terror was released in animated format, so it will be interesting to see how this is re-evaluated.
Likewise with The Faceless Ones, which I watched last night. I opted to watch the colour version.
Two of its six episodes we have been able to watch for a while - the first and third. They are set at Gatwick Airport, and are confined, for the most part, to two main sets - the Chameleons' hangar, with its concealed control room, and the Commandant's office / air traffic control room. As well as their limited locations, the episodes are also ones in which the raw-state Chameleons don't actually appear, and there is a lot of running back and forth as the story is still setting itself up.
The story really picks up after we get beyond these episodes. Whilst Gatwick still features prominently, the action expands to take in the Chameleon space station.
There are a number of very strong characters, best of whom is the Commandant, played by Colin Gordon. Nurse Pinto (Madalena Nicol) is also a very good addition to the cast, both as the real one who helps the Doctor, and as her villainous Chameleon duplicate.

Whilst these characters have significant roles to play, the same can't be said for the companions. Innes Lloyd, inexplicably, took a dislike to Ben and Polly and ordered their removal from the series at the earliest opportunity. Since Jamie had been introduced, it was felt that there was no longer any need for a second male companion. Anneke Wills was offered the chance to stay on with Hines, but out of loyalty to Michael Craze, and a general dislike of staying in any part too long, she elected to leave as well. Both actors were contracted up to the second episode of The Evil of the Daleks, but were written out early in this story. Both vanish in the first half, reappearing only for the last couple of minutes to make their farewells in scenes filmed on location. Set up as a potential replacement for Polly is Sam Briggs (Pauline Collins). She elected not to accept an on-going role.
Ben and Polly leave because they've found out that this is the very day that they first set foot inside the TARDIS, at the conclusion of The War Machines. That story is referenced in this animation as we see a newspaper headline about the War Machines being defeated.
Other visual "Easter eggs" include wanted posters of the Master in the airport police station. Preview clips showed the Delgado version of the Master, but the DVD release now features the Sacha Dhawan version pinned beneath it. Later, we see that Dhawan's poster has been replaced with one featuring the Meddling Monk. In the airport concourse we have adverts for ESGO (the gas refinery from Fury From The Deep, which is to be the next animated release later this year) and for "Magpie Electricals" - first seen in The Idiot's Lantern.
One rather annoying distraction is the placement of names of people associated with the project (e.g. a whole wall of Hickman's Oil cans - referencing Clayton Hickman, ex DWM editor). It's far from subtle. I would be interested to know why the Doctor and Jamie hide behind copies of the "Mill Hill Times" newspaper. Mill Hill lies in North London, whilst Gatwick is in Surrey, to the south of London.
One very poorly realised sequence is the fight between Sam and the Chameleon Meadows in the car park in Episode Six - this really shows up the limitations of this style of animation.
So, is the story any good? Has my opinion of it improved? I've known the orphan episodes for a while, as well as the audio and telesnaps of the missing episodes, so I'm fairly familiar with it. I've never regarded it as a bad story, merely an okay one. It was nice to finally be able to see the whole thing in one format, rather than in piecemeal fashion, and it has gone up slightly in my estimation thanks to that. Any new early Troughton material is always to be welcomed.

Inspirations - Mawdryn Undead

Only a couple of stories after cutting the companion complement down to two with Adric's demise, JNT informed Eric Saward that he wanted another male companion in the series. The "Overcrowded TARDIS" would be avoided, however, as it was intended that Nyssa would be written out in the story immediately following the new companion's introduction. Nyssa had a complicated history, having only been intended for just the one story - The Keeper of Traken. The decision to keep her on was only taken late in the day. As such, the character did not belong to the BBC, but to her creator - Johnny Byrne. Companions were usually created by the Producer and Script Editor and the BBC did not have to pay for their on-going use, whereas Nyssa earned Byrne £50 every time she appeared.
JNT had originally planned to exit Nyssa early on, but Peter Davison fought for her retention and so it was Adric who got the chop.
Originally, the story which was to have introduced the new companion was to have been the one generally known as "The Song of the Space Whale", to be written by Pat Mills and John Wagner. Mills had written for the Doctor Who Weekly comic strip as well as being well known for his work on 2000 AD. Various attempts were made to get this story produced over subsequent years, with Mills persevering after Wagner dropped out, but it never made it to the screen. It did eventually get a release on audio from Big Finish as "The Song of the Megaptera" as part of their "lost stories" strand, with the Sixth Doctor and Peri.
The story involved a community of people living inside a vast space creature, and the new companion would be one of their number.
When this story collapsed, JNT then informed Saward that the new male companion should be a public school-boy, and that he should be tying to kill the Doctor. He had decided to bring back the Guardians from Season 16 - the Key to Time season. The Black Guardian would recruit the school-boy - to be named Turlough - in his efforts to destroy the Doctor in revenge for him failing to gain the Key. There had been two trilogies over the previous seasons - the E-Space one in Season 18, and the Doctor / Master Regenerations one which bridged Seasons 18 and 19 - and these had proved popular.

As this was the 20th Anniversary year, JNT thought it might be a nice idea to bring back an element from the very beginnings of the series. With a school setting, the obvious candidate was Coal Hill School's science teacher Ian Chesterton - to be played once again by William Russell. Unfortunately he was otherwise engaged and unable to participate. The second choice was Harry Sullivan, as played by Ian Marter. It was felt that, of all the previous companions, his character could believably have gone into teaching. Unfortunately he too was unavailable.
The third choice was Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, and Nicholas Courtney could make himself available. The notion that the Brigadier might become a relatively junior staff member - teaching Mathematics of all things - of a public school on retirement from UNIT was unlikely to say the least, but this is what JNT decided. Courtney only found out that he had been third choice for this story many years later, much to his dismay.
The actor chosen to play Turlough was Mark Strickson. He had been offered a long-running role in the medical soap Angels, but really wanted the job on Doctor Who which he'd heard about instead. As such, he went to see JNT in person prior to the usual casting process commencing, and managed to talk his way into the role. JNT insisted that he dye his blond hair red, so that he did not look too similar to Peter Davison in long shots - despite Davison always wearing his beige costume, and Turlough always wearing his black school uniform. JNT had initially wanted him to shave his hair off, and Strickson said that would be fine - so long as he got paid for loss of earnings whilst he waited for it to grow back on leaving the series. The money-conscious Producer then went for the hair dye option.

The writer commissioned for this story was Peter Grimwade, whose first scripts for the show had been the overly ambitious and poorly realised Time-Flight. This time he was promised a better budget. Already a director on the show before becoming a writer, he always wanted to direct his own work but was never permitted to do so. It was from Grimwade that the public school setting had come, as he had attended one and hated it (so a lot of Turlough's complaints about school life derive from the author himself).
Grimwade also came up with the idea of a story split across two time zones. Selecting a recent one which the TARDIS crew trapped in 1983 would identify, the earlier time period was specified as 1977, with the Queen's Silver Jubilee celebrations being a prominent event. This, as you are no doubt aware, led to all manner of continuity problems as many believed that the UNIT stories took place in an unspecified "near future", probably the 1980's. In Pyramids of Mars, Sarah had stated that she came from 1980. How then could the Brigadier be retired by 1977? The new series has categorically placed the UNIT stories around the dates of transmission, though I'm sure Chris Chibnall will have a plan to screw that up as well.
One of Grimwade's loves was opera, and he uses as inspiration Wagner's Der Fliegende Hollander - The Flying Dutchman, premiered in Dresden in 1843. It is based on the legend of a cursed ship which is never allowed to come into port, and spends eternity sailing the high seas. The story is supposed to have been born in the 17th Century, originating from sailors of the Dutch East India Company. Ever since, sailors have claimed to have seen the vessel around the Cape of Good Hope, glowing with a ghostly light. Over time, the story evolved to have the ship able to come into port once every 7 years, when the captain could attempt to lift the curse if he could find a woman to fall in love with him. Everyone is more familiar with aspects of this legend thanks to its incorporation into the Pirates of the Caribbean film series.

Mawdryn and his crew of Kastron scientists (their race never referred to on screen) were cast out of their society because they experimented on themselves using stolen Time Lord technology, which made them immortal. They are able to make planet-fall every 5 years, when one of their number can leave to seek a solution to their condition. They all now just want to die.
Mawdryn, by the way, was said to be a Welsh word for "Undead", making the title "Undead Undead", but this is not the case. Grimwade used an amalgam of two Welsh words - Marw (dead) and Dyn (man).
Grimwade had worked on the BBC's adaptation of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979). This features an ex-spy who is now living and working in a less than senior role at a boys' public school. His pride and joy is his car, and there is a pupil nicknamed 'Jumbo'. The Brigadier is an ex-secretive military operative, who is now living and working in a less than senior role at a boys' public school. His pride and joy is his car, and there is a pupil nicknamed 'Hippo'.
Coincidence? I think not.
Next time: more Wagnerian operatic influences, plus a whole lot of Norse mythology. First the TARDIS, and then Nyssa, break up with the Doctor...

Unseen Stories (6)

The Fifth Doctor
As we've already seen, once John Nathan-Turner took over as producer, there was a conscious effort to cut back on the humour in the programme. One of these humorous elements had been the propensity of the Doctor to name-drop, usually in a funny way (the Doctor writing Hamlet due to Shakespeare hurting his wrist writing sonnets, dropping apples on Isaac Newton's head etc.).
As such, from The Leisure Hive onward we get fewer references to unseen stories.
As the new Doctor undergoes his regeneration crisis in Castrovalva, he mentally regresses back through earlier incarnations, and at one point recalls an incident involving the Ice Warriors, during which the Brigadier was present. Now, this might all be part of his mental trauma, jumbling up different events, but it might equally well be a genuine memory of an unseen adventure involving the Ice Warriors and UNIT.
In Four to Doomsday he states that he knew Sir Francis Drake (c.1540 - 1596), hero of the Spanish Armada rout. He also claims to have taken five wickets for New South Wales, but doesn't specify the date. The club was founded in  1856, but the match he played in must have been sometime after 1933, when the "chinaman" style of spin bowling is said to have been born. The term is no longer used, being now deemed racially offensive - Wisden, the cricketing bible, dropping it as of 2018. As a time traveller, the Doctor ought to have known that.
Of course, the First Doctor didn't even recognise cricket, but he knows all about it from his Fourth incarnation onward. Presumably all that time spent in exile on Earth during his Third incarnation is when he picked up a taste for the game.
The Doctor seems to know a lot of detail about the Terileptils, recognising the injuries of their leader as having come from the tinclavic mines on Raaga (not the sort of thing a text book would have told him).
Arc of Infinity seems to suggest that there has been an unseen return to Gallifrey at some point, as he seems very familiar with the current make-up of the High Council. He asks Damon how Leela is, though Damon was absent from The Invasion of Time. Some history with the new Castellan is also implied.
The King's Demons gives us the first mention in the series of the Eye of Orion, which the Doctor seems to have visited on more than one occasion. Unlike most other holiday destinations mentioned in the past, we'll actually get to see it in the very next story - The Five Doctors. This story throws up more potential "Season 6b" implications, with the Second Doctor recalling that the Time Lords wiped the memories of Jamie and Zoe. He couldn't possibly know this before going to the Brigadier's UNIT reunion party, and he's travelling alone. (He's actually wrong about them remembering him, as the Time Lords allowed them each to retain their memory of their first encounter with him. It's the fact that Jamie knows who the Brigadier is that's significant). The Second Doctor also mentions an encounter with the Terrible Zodin, when the Brigadier definitely wasn't present.
The Third Doctor appears to recognise a Raston Warrior Robot, suggesting a previous encounter.
Then there's that trip the Fourth Doctor and Romana took to Cambridge...
It is suggested even more clearly that the Doctor and the Castellan have history. Chancellor Flavia then states that she has the honour of offering the Presidency of the High Council to the Doctor "yet again" - even though we've never seen her do this before.
Warriors of the Deep throws up all sorts of continuity problems regarding the Silurians and the Sea Devils. In some ways it is trying to say there were just the two Third Doctor encounters, yet the detail says there has to have been an unseen adventure involving the specific members of the Silurian Triad. He recognises a Silurian battle cruiser, and the Myrka, though neither ever featured before.
There is an unseen trip to 1643 to drop off the temporally displaced Will Chandler after the events of The Awakening.
The Doctor seems to have learned about developments in the Dalek-Movellan war, knowing all about the Movellan gas. Note how the Doctor knows exactly where and when to go to visit this conflict, in its active stages, in The Pilot.
Finally, for the Fifth Doctor, we have him visiting Androzani Minor, which he says he has been to before. He seems to have known Professor Jackij, at a time before he discovered the cure for spectrox toxaemia, as he hasn't heard of spectrox before.

What's Wrong With... The Chase

It's a story written by Terry Nation, directed by Richard Martin, and starring William Hartnell as the Doctor - so the potential for things not going to plan is vast.
The Chase opens with a recap from the end of the previous story, so we once again get to see those oddly positioned pieces of Dalek equipment, which don't appear to have been designed with Daleks in mind at all.
We then have a lengthy scene in the TARDIS with the Space-Time Visualiser. A couple of oddities here, starting with how did the Doctor get a machine that big through the TARDIS doors? Why does it have the names of planets of our Solar System around its circumference, when in theory it can pick up images of any past time or place in the universe? If it originates in the Solar System, how did it end up on Xeros in the first place?
The cartridges which the Doctor inserts seem to know to go straight to the exact point in space / time selected by the companions. Ian never specifies Gettysburg, but it knows that's what he wants to see from only a rough geographical choice. Then we have Vicki professing to be the big Beatles fan, having visited their memorial shrine in Liverpool - yet she doesn't appear to be familiar with their music. (Which reminds me of something I neglected to mention when looking at The Space Museum. She knows all about the Daleks from books, but none of these tomes seemed to have a picture of them, as she said she didn't know what they looked like. Later in this story she'll mention having read about their destruction of 'Old' New York - again in a book with no pictures, apparently).
Ian then appears to know a Beatles song recorded more than a year after he and Barbara left contemporary England.
On to the planet Aridius, and Vicki's hairstyle changes between scenes shot in the studio and those done on film at Camber Sands, when she's played by an extra. It's in bunches in studio, and loose when on location. The sound effects don't match the action when the trap door opens and then closes in the dunes, and the Mire Beast tentacle is very slow to move in to shot. It is also very obvious that the trap door is made of rather flimsy wood, with the dune being a sand-covered tarpaulin. We'll see this again when the Doctor and company lure the Dalek into their trap later in the second episode.
Maureen O'Brien appears corpses when describing her childhood fears about the ring in the ground and the castle, clearly throwing William Russell.
As with last story, people cast shadows on supposedly distant backgrounds.
One of the Daleks patrolling the dunes is clearly being "walked" by its operator (something which we'll see again when we get to Destiny of the Daleks).
The explosion in the tunnel was also filmed outside the studio, so Vicki's hair is wrong again.
The sound effects are awry once more when the Mire Beast breaks through the wall, coming in far too early.
The shots of the TARDIS and the "DARDIS" in the Vortex are clearly photographic cut-outs, and you can even see the piece of dowling holding them at times.
The name-plate of the "Mary Celeste" is seen too early, giving the game away. We later get the very slow pan round the ship before alighting on it, plus Ian then telling Barbara about it in the TARDIS. It only needed one or the other reveal for the audience - not both. The Dalek which falls overboard splits in two, and we get a good view of its empty innards.
In the "DARDIS", we can see that two of the Daleks are Peter Cushing movie ones with the big fender removed. Some inlay work of a countdown clock is superimposed over a Dalek, when it is supposed to be on a monitor in the background.
Lots of problems in the Haunted House. The actor playing Count Dracula is a terrible mime. Nearly every sound effect is miscued - from bats to creaky floorboards. One of the bats clearly gets its strings entangled on the staircase.
There's a Dalek very obviously lurking under the stairs, long before they're supposed to have arrived.
We also have to ask why these automatons are still active when the fun fair is closed down, and why would the Frankenstein Monster one be so aggressive to visitors. And why does it change its clothes?
Barbara struggles with the revolving alcove.
To this day I still haven't worked out what the ghostly grey lady is supposed to be saying.
We then have the Daleks' android copy of the Doctor, which looks absolutely nothing like him. He's another terrible mime as well.
On to Mechanus, and the studio lighting is so bright that we don't see the difference when the path of lights are switched on. The Fungoids are supposed to be afraid of light, yet the rod-like weapon which Barbara finds has only a tiny pea-bulb, which is again hardly noticeable on screen.
There's another static movie Dalek in the jungle, but worst of all is a clear shot of Camera 5 in the background (see image above).
In the morning, everyone is amazed to see the Mechonoid city towering above them - but why didn't they spot it when the lights were turned on the night before?
Use of the word Mechonoid (and spelling thereof) is inconsistent. The Daleks seem to be using an older version of the script where they were called Mechons - changed as it sounded like the villain from Dan Dare.
We all know that one of the reasons that the Mechonoids failed to take off was that they were far to big for the studio spaces, and there has always been a rumour that Raymond Cusick deliberately made them far too big to spite Terry Nation, who was making a fortune from the Daleks - money he wasn't seeing any of.
Where on earth (or Mechanus) did Steven Taylor get all that wood and rope from? He can't have asked for it, as the whole point of the Mechonoids is that no-one can communicate with them.
The length of cable patently does not match the height of the building. Peter Purves is about to say 15 feet but quickly amends it to 1500 feet. When Vicki is supposed to be hanging from it, it appears very loose, almost as though there were no weight on it all... Ian almost pulls Barbara's trousers off in this scene.
The Doctor's much anticipated anti-Dalek weapon only kills one Dalek, yet somehow manages to set the entire city on fire.
Whilst some people might go back into a blazing inferno to save a real panda, would a hardened space pilot really risk life and limb to go back for a toy one?
The final scenes of the Doctor parting company with Ian and Barbara include one Hartnell's most famous fluffs, when he tells the school teachers they will end up "a couple of cinders floating around in Spain... Space...".
It's such a pity that we never got to see their explanation to the Coal Hill Head Master of where they had been for the last two years...

The revelation nobody wanted

In some ways the revelation of the Doctor being the Timeless Child, cast adrift from some alternative dimension and not just another Time Lord from Gallifrey, hasn't actually changed very much. It plugs the continuity point from The Brain of Morbius and goes some ways to explaining why the Doctor has never been quite like any other Time Lord. Up until The War Games we knew nothing about the character save that they came from another planet, although early writers presented the Doctor more as a time traveller than a space adventurer. The emphasis was more on him coming from the future rather than being an alien. He sometimes described himself in human terms, and only appeared to have one heart.
Susan claimed to have named the TARDIS, and several times the Doctor seemed to suggest that he had built the ship himself. Things started to change with the introduction of the Monk in The Time Meddler, when we saw that the TARDIS was not unique. The Doctor mentioned coming from a different time to the Monk ("50 years earlier"), again implying that time was more important to him than space.
More revelations followed, as we saw that the Doctor could renew his body when it grew too frail, and he would then tell Jamie and Victoria that he was around 450 years old in Earth terms.
The War Games finally gave us the Doctor's backstory. He was a Time Lord from another planet, one of a race of people who were almost immortal barring accidents. He had stolen the TARDIS and set out to explore the universe, as the Time Lords preferred to merely observe and never interfere. He saw himself as a crusader as much as an explorer.
In the next story we learn of the two hearts and the other differences in his anatomy that make him only appear human.
Other details about the Time Lords followed, such as their use of the Doctor as an agent for intervention, when they couldn't be seen to interfere. We learned of Omega and how he gave the Time Lords the power needed to kickstart their time travel experiments. The Deadly Assassin then introduced Rassilon, and we saw that the Time Lords weren't such God-like beings after all. Beneath the facade they were just like us. We also learned that Time Lords could only regenerate 12 times, which told us that this was unlikely to be some purely biological process, but rather some product of genetic engineering, which is something that The Timeless Children has now confirmed.
So over the years we have always been drip-fed new information about the Doctor.
The problem is that we have never, ever wanted to know everything. Every time the mystery of the Doctor us revealed, the character has been diminished. Steven Moffat played around with the Doctor's name for more than a season, but he was never intending to ever reveal it. Back in the 80's Marc Platt proposed a story called "Lungbarrow" which would have taken the Doctor back to his ancestral home and revealed all sorts of details about his background as "the Other" who was a contemporary of Omega and Rassilon - an idea hinted at in Season 25. Everyone thought that Platt's idea was a stupid one, as revealing too much about the Doctor was a mistake. There may not be a question mark after Doctor Who but some sense of mystery about who they are and where they come from has always been part of the series' attraction.
No one really wanted to know any more about the Doctor's background. Enough had already been told, generally diminishing the character as I've said. The final two seasons of the Classic Era were specifically trying to put the mystery back into the series, rather than to remove it as too much had been revealed, and everyone agrees this was a good idea.
The Doctor was at his best when he was the mysterious traveller, origins unknown, who didn't even know how to pilot the TARDIS properly. A Doctor who was simply an explorer, but who fought injustice whenever he encountered it simply because it was the right thing to do.
When the series returned in 2005, Russell T Davies had done away with the Time Lords, making the Doctor the explorer once again. Moffat then bogged the character down in interminable story arcs and made the Doctor some kind of intergalactic celebrity, known to everyone, which was a huge mistake. He backtracked by then having the Doctor go round removing himself from every database.
Chibnall has decided to give the Doctor a whole new backstory - one which, like I've said, nobody was really asking for. If he wanted to divorce the Doctor further from the Time Lords and make the character more mysterious again then he's gone about it the wrong way. Far too much was given away about the Timeless Child. A better writer would have dropped hints and left it at that, allowing fans to speculate. The Master simply indulges in one massive info-dump of exposition. Surely there were better ways of revealing some of this through proper storytelling?
Does any of this really matter? Has Chibnall broken the programme?
Not really, as we've just seen how he has simply swapped one backstory for another, albeit in a terribly clumsy manner.
As always, when fans try to plug continuity gaps they just create new ones. The TARDIS Dr Ruth had shouldn't look like a Police Box. If the Timeless Child is such a significant figure for the Time Lords how did they come to lose him when he ran away from Gallifrey? Surely they would have kept him locked away to stop other races discovering his regenerative abilities.
At the end of the day, I don't really care who the Doctor is. I never have.
What's always been more important to me is what the Doctor does.
I had to laugh when I saw the cover of the new DWM due out on Thursday. "Jo Martin is the Doctor" it exclaims. No she isn't. She has done absolutely nothing to deserve that title. Just saying you're the Doctor and having a TARDIS means f*** all. Who the Doctor is, what their backstory is, it's all immaterial. It's what they do that counts. It's really sad that the current showrunner doesn't understand this.

The Timeless Children - Review

I didn't expect quite so much to be explained by this episode. Chibnall hinted that it would pose more questions, but that really wasn't the case at all. Spoilers ahead...
The Doctor is the Timeless Child. An early explorer from Gallifrey - Tecteun - found the child, who had fallen through a portal from an alternative universe / dimension. She took the child back to Gallifrey and studied her, and discovered that she could regenerate when fatally injured. Tecteun eventually worked out what caused this regeneration process and used it on herself - becoming the first Gallifreyan to regenerate. More of her people were then given this gift - an elite who called themselves Time Lords. Up to this point, native Gallifreyans were known as Shebogans. The Timeless Child lived through many regenerations, before ultimately becoming the Doctor. An organisation known as "The Division" employed them - presumably some sort of precursor to the Celestial Intervention Agency - who were not averse to using their powers to interfere in the affairs of other species. The Division would regularly wipe the Timeless Child's mind after these clandestine operations - which is why the Doctor doesn't remember this life before the one she can recall. Dr Ruth would have been one of these forgotten incarnations. What wasn't explained was why the Timeless Child had a whole lifetime of memories as an Irishman named Brendan in the first place - especially when that lifetime included being a baby and a small boy. All that stuff from last week seems pointless now.
All of this came to light when the Master took the Doctor into the Matrix. The only material not explained was the bit about The Division, as it had been redacted. The Doctor eventually escaped the Matrix by overloading it with her own memories - cue clips from earlier seasons. It is significant that one of these clips was the "mind wrestling" duel between the Fourth Doctor and Morbius, suggesting that the faces we saw were indeed earlier, pre-Hartnell, incarnations of the Doctor.
All these revelations will get a mixed reception from fans. There are those who are going to accept that this is simply greater insight into the Doctor's background, explaining why she of all the Time Lords has always been so different. Others just won't accept such a seismic change to established canon. I've seen a few people on-line stating that they will walk away from the programme if the suspected events of tonight's episode were going to come to pass. I won't be one of them. It's a massive disruption, but one I'm sure I'll come to terms with. It does not necessarily negate everything that's gone before, as some will argue.
This new information does pose problems with continuity. If the first Gallifreyan to regenerate was a woman, then how come every one of the Time Lords we have previously seen in The War Games, Colony In Space, The Three Doctors and The Deadly Assassin were all male? Early Gallifrey was also shown to be ethnically diverse, and yet those same four stories showed only white men. The Invasion of Time had only one female character, in a minor position, and again all were white. Arc of Infinity and The Five Doctors at least featured one female on the High Council - though everyone was again white. The entire court seen in Trial of a Time Lord was composed of white people, and none of the jury were female. At what point in their history did the Time Lords become a white, male dominated society? The question also has to be asked, if the Timeless Child spent much of their life female and ethnically diverse, why did they end up being a white man for thirteen regenerations?
You can't just shoehorn the BBC's current diversity policies into a programme that's been running nearly 60 years.
Sacha Dhawan, as expected, was brilliant as the Master. I said last week he would give Ashad a run for his money. He gave everyone a run for their money. He had more screen time than the Doctor, thanks to having him run around with the Cybermen in the real world, and still be with the Doctor, psychically, in the Matrix at the same time. One huge disappointment, which I'm sure everyone will pick up on, was the treatment of Ashad. He was set up brilliantly in the last two episodes, just to be summarily killed by the Master half way through the episode. He deserved much better than this.
The Master's plan was to combine the Cybermen and the Time Lords, whose bodies he had kept after destroying the Citadel - so that he could create an army of Cybermen able to regenerate.
We saw some of these Time Lord / Cybermen hybrids, and I must say I thought they looked rather stupid, with frilly lace fan-shaped designs on their helmets.
It was really obvious that one of the others was going to take the Doctor's place when it came to detonating the "Death Particle", and I really, really hoped that it would have been one of the companions. We really need a change in this TARDIS line-up, and one of them sacrificing themselves to save the Doctor would have been great. Yaz was the obvious candidate for this, after the scene where she and Graham spoke about bravery earlier. Instead we got Ko Sharmus doing the self-sacrificial duties - a wasted opportunity. Looks like we're stuck with the same overcrowded TARDIS team for next time.
The series desperately needs some change in the line-up.
The title of the New Year Special was revealed at the end, after we had a cliffhanger conclusion. The companions and the surviving humans have made it back to Earth in a TARDIS, which has disguised itself as a two-up, two down house on an estate (scope for a spin-off sitcom here). Another TARDIS has taken the Doctor back to her own ship, but before she can catch her breath she is arrested by Judoon, and transported to a cell in a prison asteroid. The BBC have stupidly let it be known that Captain Jack will be in the New Year Special, so presumably he is the one who helps the Doctor escape back to Earth, which is where we know that the Daleks will be waiting, having been quite publicly filmed on the Clifton Suspension Bridge at Bristol. The title for this special is Revolution of the Daleks, and a video vlog I've seen recently claims that the story involves yet another Dalek civil war, and Davros might appear. The opportunity is there for the human survivors to feature, if that sitcom hasn't already been commissioned, and there is always the possibility that Graham and Ravio will develop a romance that will take him out of the series before Series 13.
And what of the Master? We cut away from Ko Sharmus activating the Death Particle in the Matrix Room on Gallifrey, so he may well have managed to escape.
He always does.
He will be back.

Finale, then holiday

I'm going to be away for a week from tomorrow, so I'll be posting my musings on The Timeless Children tonight, which might be before some of you have actually had the chance to watch it. My post will inevitably contain spoilers, so if you want to avoid knowing anything about the episode then stay away for 24 hours or so (and keep away from social media in general). I will be back, with business as usual, from 9th March.