“The Cybermen were defeated. The victors of a billion battles broken. But that which is dead can live again – in the hands of a believer.”
Since their debut on the eve of the series’ first regeneration, the Cybermen have, more often than not, been portrayed as a spent force. Until very recently, one greyscale invasion and an upstaged army of ghosts were the closest that we’d come to seeing them at the height of their powers, yet all the while whispers of famed but distant Cyber Wars fired viewers’ imaginations. “Ascension of the Cybermen”, in contrast, is a long overdue love letter to every fan who endured Revenge of the Cybermen purely on the strength of its talk of glories past. Striking a perfect balance between brazen fan service and the breaking of new ground, this season’s penultimate episode finally delivers the sort of dominant Cyber-race that has only ever really lived in our minds’ eyes. It does so, though, in the most improbable of ways as this resurgent Cyber-force’s leader is a terrifying zealot who rages against his own biological existence as vehemently as he does his enemies’.
“A Cyberman that makes other Cybermen scream,” Ashad is one of the series’ most imposing antagonists in recent memory. Indeed, the so-called Lone Cyberman seems to have the same sort of potential as Davros, the creator of the Daleks, with whom he has so much in common. The anger and passion that fuel Ashad are the very un-Cyberman-like qualities that he seeks to purge, and his apparent insight into this incongruity only makes him even more unhinged. Patrick O’Kane is relentlessly intense in his portrayal of the half-man, half-Cyberman; every line that he delivers is dripping with liquid metal angst that blows last season’s de facto big bad - fellow big shouty dude Tim Shaw - out of the water.
It helps, of course, that Ashad is not the “Lone Cyberman” anymore – in fact, he’s backed up by the sort of season-finale-ordinance poor old Tim Shaw could only dream of. The Cyber-drones – essentially flying, shooty Cyber-heads – work surprisingly excellently, while the beautifully designed Cyber-shuttles and Cyber-carriers finally give the Cybermen a consistent and appropriately functional aesthetic. The unexpected return of the sixth-season Cybermen, rebranded as “Cyber-warriors” here in the Doctor Who equivalent of Star Trek: Enterprise’s Klingon forehead retcon, is also a particularly lovely treat for seasoned viewers, not to mention a testament to the quality of The Invasion Cybermen’s basic design. Best of all though, director Jamie Magnus Stone uses these extraordinary gifts of the script to present a fittingly bleak and unremittingly exciting visual and auditory experience that’s capable of holding its own against many fully-fledged features.
However, “Ascension of the Cybermen” causes as many continuity conundrums as it solves, and worse still it is undermined by its subservience to “The Timeless Children”, which compromises both its structure and its integrity. Chibnall’s fan-pleasing attempts to unify the classic series’ Cybermen with their modern counterparts are blighted by comparatively easy-to-avoid gaffes about gold, outward inconsistencies with much more recent adventures and even a peculiarly protective Doctor. The latter is, perhaps, justifiable, given Bill’s fate in “World Enough and Time”, but what happened to the Doctor’s previous companion isn’t even hinted at, let alone acknowledged, leaving many viewers to ponder why the Doctor is behaving so out of character.
“Be afraid, Doctor, because everything is about to change. Forever.”
But with a running time that eclipses those of most of the series’ festive specials, “The Timeless Children” is already full to bursting. In what feels like an over-the-top apology for not providing the audience with a proper finale in 2018, here Chibnall delivers a scintillating climax that doesn’t just pay off a season’s worth of build-up, or even two seasons’ worth, but follows through on an alluring idea that has been bubbling away in the background since the dying days of the series’ original run, if not the early Tom Baker years. Chibnall’s byzantine tale blows Gallifreyan history wide open, not to mention what little we know of the Doctor’s own personal history, and as if that weren’t enough it takes the Cybermen and turns them into the new lords of time – pomp and all. The image of a Cyberman, decked out in customary high-collared Time Lord regalia, regenerating, is one that will endure for decades to come. “The Timeless Children” is thus a rare example of television capable of keeping you perched uncomfortably on the edge of your seat for over an hour, fists clenched and heart in your mouth as its unyielding precision of powerful imagery and game-changing revelations hold you rapt – whether you like them or not.
Having spent almost sixty years with the Doctor, the Who in Doctor Who has long since lost its lustre; even the retrospective insertion of John Hurt’s time warrior between the supposed eighth and ninth Doctors only served to lift the veil on the once beautifully shadowy Time War. Yet in the late 1980s, when producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Andrew Cartmel decided to imbue Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor with the mystery that had, by that time, been lost in a precession of Gallifreyan runarounds and meetings with the Doctor’s old mentors and school chums, they did so by ingeniously hinting at a time before the Doctor became the Doctor – a life back in the Dark Times, the so-called Time of Chaos, before Omega’s supernova and Rassilon’s tyranny. The series’ cancellation unfortunately killed this promising arc before it ever really got moving, though Virgin’s long-running range of New Adventures novels did run with it to what felt like its natural conclusion in Marc Platt’s seminal Lungbarrow, in which the idea of this ‘Other’ Doctor finally crystallised.
In many respects, “The Timeless Children” goes ever further than even Lungbarrow dared to. Here, not only does Chibnall posit that the Doctor lived at least eight lifetimes prior to the childhood that she remembers, but he also has the Master claim that she was the biological key that turned the ancient Gallifreyans into lords of time. Far from being the child of Gallifrey that she’s always believed herself to be, here the Doctor discovers that she was in fact discovered aeons ago by Tecteun, a Shobogan explorer, who, upon discovering her ability to renew her physical form when mortally wounded, studied her and eventually learned how to graft her unnatural abilities onto Gallifreyan DNA. As Omega’s time travel experiments gave the Shobogans mastery over time, Tecteun’s discoveries offered them near immortality through bodily regeneration. Chibnall doesn’t merely cast the Doctor as the third shadowy member of an ancient Gallifreyan ruling triumvirate, then – he has her as the mother of all Time Lords. Suddenly, questions on everything from the Doctor’s past deeds to her very origins burn as hot as they ever did. For the first time in fifty years, even the Doctor’s species is couched in mystery, tempting to viewers to re-evaluate everything they know about the Time Lord – or thought they knew. Could the Doctor be half-human as the eighth Doctor once claimed? Just whose granddaughter is Susan – the Doctor’s, or one of her forgotten pre-Doctor selves?
Of course, as epic and as astonishing as “The Timeless Children”’s infodump is, in the end it is really just the preamble for this episode’s events. Chibnall’s story is as much about the Master’s present as it is the Doctor’s past, and Sacha Dhawan never lets you forget it. The Doctor’s oldest adversary has always had a flair for the dramatic and penchant for anarchy, but it’s rare to see him vested with the purpose that he is here. It’s as if his discoveries have vindicated his hatred for his old nemesis – he’s at once delighted and tormented, scheming and suicidal; torn between a desire to survive and conquer, and an impossible-to-resist impulse to just burn it all down. More than anything else, the Master has always been a self-serving creature – “Survival. It’s what he lives for,” Sylvester McCoy once purred – and so to see him genuinely disinterested in the continuation of his own existence is tremendously sobering, and more than a little disturbing. For me, it sums up the magnitude of his attachment to the Doctor far more brilliantly than even Missy’s redemption arc did.
Jodie Whittaker is Dhawan’s equal throughout, bringing unprecedented gravity to her performance as the show builds towards its most triumphant moment since “The Day of the Doctor”. In a move redolent of the final Star Wars movie, Segun Akinola breaks all the rules as he lets the series’ signature theme soar in the main body of an episode as the Doctor broadcasts her memories to break out of the Matrix. To all of those hung up on no longer being able to call the Doctor’s incarnations by numbers long since rendered redundant (I’m really going to have to start capitalising them as they’ve become names in their own right), I’d urge them to watch this scene: the whole point of it, of the whole episode in fact, is that it doesn’t matter who the Doctor was or where she came from. All that matters is who she is, what she believes in and what she does. All we ever have is now.
Up against such staggering performances, you could be forgiven for expecting this story’s supporting players to be lost in the background but, to the credit of both the actors and the script, their characters shine almost as brightly as the two sharing centre stage. Game of Thrones veteran Ian McElhinney is particularly effective as the portal’s ferryman, Ko Sharmus, who, in contrast to his quasi-biblical countenance, twinkles with amiable mischief throughout. Meanwhile, Bradley Walsh and Mandip Gill are every bit as impressive as Graham and Yas. This two-parter finally sees the two companions shine as they prove to the Doctor, and to themselves, that they can do it all without her. Happily though, Chibnall stops short of pairing off Graham with Julie Graham’s Ravio – the fam might be left behind, but we’ve certainly not seen the last of them.
Doctor Who is available to stream for the foreseeable future on BBC iPlayer. A season pass comprising all ten episodes of the season in 1080p HD and bonus material is also available from iTunes for £20.99, with episodes typically becoming available the day after their transmission on BBC 1. A Blu-ray steelbook, which will also include the special “Resolution”, is also available to pre-order from Amazon for £49.99.
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