Doctor Who (2023): The Giggle

Episode:

874

|

Serial:

303

|

Writer:

Russell T Davies

|

Director:

Chanya Button

|

Air Date:

09-Dec-2023

---

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching the third and final Doctor Who 60th Anniversary special, The Giggle. That's seriously the title they went with. That's going to be stuck with us in episode lists forever now. Still, at least it's easier to spell than The Tsuranga Conundrum or The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos.

I just typed those from memory by the way, which I guess proves that my exposure to Doctor Who has gone way beyond safe limits. I can't remember what happened in Flux though, so there's still hope.

I'm expecting that this is where we see the Fourteenth Doctor regenerate into Ncuti Gatwa, which is a bit sad actually. It's rare that I honestly can say that a Doctor is going too soon, but this time he's really going too soon. Three episodes doesn't quite beat Paul McGann's record of one movie, but it's a lot shorter than Christopher Eccleston's thirteen episodes and even that wasn't enough.

There will be SPOILERS below for this story and earlier ones.

---

Damn, even the past is tinted blue at night. They're not being subtle with the colour grading on these specials.

Wild Blue Yonder ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, with everyone in London going mad, but this teaser is jumping back 98 years to show off some classic cars. The series has visited the 20s a couple of times before, with Black Orchid taking place in 1925 and The Unicorn and the Wasp happening in 1926. Plus Daleks in Manhattan was set in 1930, which is pretty close.

This time we're in Soho however... which is about two miles south of Camden Market, where the last episode ended. Showrunner Russell T Davies really likes to hang around London for whatever reason.

A man enters a toy shop and finds famous American actor Neil Patrick Harris putting on a very suspect German accent for some reason. He's really dialled it up to 11 and he just keeps talking. Also, there's a weird bit where he drops the accent for a moment and mentions to the customer that he must be used to a sunnier climate. I guess to show he likes to have fun toying with people.

It turns out that all the man wants is a doll. Not the whole family of dolls, just the one doll. Stooky Bill. It's for his employer John Logie Baird, who's currently inventing television!

There he is, grinning like a creepy toymaker while tearing a doll's head off. John Logie Baird is fairly well known, due to inventing television and so on, but Stooky Bill is also famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page too. That's because he was the first-ever televised face.

Baird points out here that he can't record a human face, because of the immense heat of the lighting rig needed to make his image show up at all with his contraption's weak photocells. Then we get a demonstration of that, as the doll literally bursts into flames, filling the room with the smell of singed human hair. This is actually true... well, the part about the hair getting a bit singed at least. Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about fire, it just got hot.

Still, it's a good horrifying image to end a teaser with.

OPENING CREDITS

The episode jumps back to today, where London's currently in chaos. And there's Neil Patrick Harris again in the background, almost unrecognisable in a top hat and tux.

The last episode ended with Doctor and Donna arriving to find her granddad Wilf waiting in front of the TARDIS to tell them the bad news. Then a plane came down from the sky and exploded, which is never a good sign. This apparently all started two days ago when everyone suddenly started thinking they were right all the time and wouldn't change their minds. Uh, I think that started further back than two days ago.

Bernard Cribbins died between episodes, so Wilf is now played by a stand-in. We were lucky to get him back at all really. In fact, I think we were lucky to get any of the actors back, as these specials have been pretty good so far. Still time for it all to go horribly wrong however.

Fortunately, UNIT finds them and gets the stand-in playing Wilf to safety. Meanwhile, the Doctor, Donna and the TARDIS are being taken to that shiny new UNIT HQ we got a glimpse of two episodes ago.

Man, I told you what UNIT were like two episodes ago. If you leave the TARDIS parked where they can see it there's always a chance they'll just fly over and grab it. It happened in the 50th Anniversary special as well, though things are a bit too serious and apocalyptic this time for a comedy scene of the Doctor hanging off the bottom of it. They've even got the classic RTD era UNIT theme playing.

The Doctor meets Kate Stewart on the helicopter pad and for a moment it looks like she's about to punch him. Instead, he gets a hug. She's faced some real threats in the past, but taking on the entire human race is a bit much and she's struggling.

They walk from the helipad to the new sci-fi command centre and... hang on, this is really familiar. I thought the new UNIT HQ was Stark Tower from The Avengers, but it's actually the D.E.O. from Supergirl! I should've known the guy who was inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer back in 2005 would also watch Supergirl.

A UNIT employee hands him a tablet and it takes him a second to realise who it is.

It's Mel! The Sixth Doctor's second companion and the Seventh Doctor's first. I shouldn't be surprised to see her here in 2023, as she was in the companion support group in The Power of the Doctor, but it's still kind of weird to me.

I was never sure where in time and space Mel came from, as her first appearance was during a flashforward to an adventure the Doctor hasn't had yet, and Colin Baker got fired before they could show how they met. We did get to see her leave the TARDIS however, and even though the series wasn't 100% specific on the time period, the clues pointed towards it being 2 million years in the future. Either way, getting back was clearly not an insurmountable problem for her.

I'm also a bit surprised about how little attention she's getting here. When Sarah Jane Smith came back she practically got her own episode and Tegan and Ace got a fair amount of screen time in The Power of the Doctor. Mel's return isn't treated like a big deal by comparison.

Kate tells the Doctor what's going on and it's basically what the guy on the street said: almost everyone on Earth is convinced that they're right. So he was right about that much!

Then we see a press conference by a conspicuously red-faced prime minister, where he admits he doesn't care about any of them. A bit of subtle political commentary there. Also, the pilot who crashed the jet at the end of the last episode was declaring his right to land wherever he wants. So it's not just that people are sure of themselves, they're also doing what they feel like with zero regard for consequences. I mean, the dude knew that he was going to explode and die if he ploughed his aircraft into the ground, you don't get your pilot's licence if you believe that's fake news.

Fortunately, everyone at UNIT is fine due to a device called the Zeedex. It disrupts the brain, but they each wear one on their arm for some reason.

Also, it was invented by the Vlinx, who is just thrown into the episode out of nowhere, like it's perfectly normal to see a weird robot creature in the corner of a government command centre. I'm suddenly getting flashbacks to the robot SAM in 24 spoof NTSF:SD:SUV::, and I'm going to think of that every time I see him.

Kate decides to give the Doctor (and the audience) a demonstration of what happens to a rational person when the Zeedex is deactivated... and she chooses herself. At first I thought it was a bit strange for a leader who needs her subordinates to have confidence in her decisions to make a spectacle of herself while incapacitated, but then I realised it's exactly what a Star Trek captain would do. She's not going to ask any of her people to do something she wouldn't do herself.

So the Zeedex is turned off and Kate quickly ramps up to full-on conspiracy nut, accusing the Doctor of being an alien infiltrator, spotting the 'coincidence' of Donna and Mel both having red hair, and claiming that she's seen Shirley walking! She has to have her Zeedex forcefully put back on in the end, and when she recovers she's mortified with what she did.

I'm glad we got this demonstration, because it really does make it clearer what's going on. It's not just that people are convinced that they're right, it's that their reasoning is being messed with and their emotions heightened. There was something similar going on in an early Star Trek episode, an effect they said was similar to alcohol. I think whatever this is has an effect similar to social media.

Of course, they could just solve this 'global pandemic' by 'vaccinating' everyone with a Zeedex.

Hey, it's Trinity Wells! We haven't seen her since the end of the Russell T Davies era! The first one I mean. She's got her own show now, so that's cool.

Unfortunately, she believes that the Zeedex is part of a conspiracy and she's telling everyone not to use them. After seeing Kate we can presume most news anchors are similarly paranoid. So yeah, no one's going to be choosing to wear a Zeedex.

Though to be fair, UNIT apparently got these things designed and manufactured in like two days, so that's a bit suspicious. And after all the trouble the world's had with things like ATMOS, Magpie televisions and the Archangel satellite network, maybe it's worth investigating this miraculous new technology a little bit, especially as they freely admit that it alters the user's thought patterns! What are you hiding, UNIT? Could it be that you don't want individuals to believe that they're right?

Anyway, I have no idea what real-world events could've inspired this story.

The Archangel Network is actually brought up by the characters, as they try to determine the cause of this condition. It started two days ago just as the South Korean KOSAT 5 satellite was activated, bringing the internet to the entire world, but there's nothing in the signal. Nothing they can detect at least.

They analyse the effect on the brain and Donna figures out what she's seeing right away. It's not four knocks this time, it's seven notes. Not a tune though, a giggle. The toy shop owner's giggle to be precise, not that anyone could possibly know that.

The Doctor reveals Stooky Bill hiding inside everyone's screens, laughing at them, and now that everyone's finally online it's driving them all mad. He's a bit of a metaphorical villain, this one.

In fact, the Doctor goes on a whole rant about they shouldn't use television or the internet Stooky Bill as an excuse, as everything going on out there is all us, and we've never needed any help to hate each other. Damn Doctor, you sure know how to give people a motivational speech in their darkest hour.

Maybe he's trying to avoid anyone remembering the fact that he did the same thing himself back in Day of the Moon, implanting a subliminal message into footage of the moon landing to drive the human race to paranoia and violence.

Kate's waiting on permission to destroy the satellite, but all the world leaders are affected so it's not going to come. So the Doctor gives her permission. They don't mention that he's the President of the World during a crisis like this, but it seems like he's got the authority.

Mel has the satellite moved over the UK so that they can blast it with their Galvanic Beam. I guess she can't just turn it off though.

It's a bit strange having Mel here as she's pretty much doing the same job as Shirley and taking half her lines, but it's nice to see her again and have a chance to find out what she's been up to. Her last appearance was in The Power of the Doctor, but her last episode was Dragonfire, back in 1987.

Doctor Who (1963) 24-14 - Dragonfire, Part Three

This means I finally get an excuse to show a screencap of the Seventh Doctor's console room! I wrote about Silver Nemesis last month as it's the 25th Anniversary story, but the console room never showed up!

Dragonfire ended with Mel deciding to go off with intergalactic scoundrel Sabalom Glitz, who'd just acquired a space colony. Glitz was a recurring character from 2 million years in the future so she was left a long way from home. We learn here that Glitz died aged 101 by tripping on a bottle of whisky, so she decided to get a lift from a zingo and come back home. Even the Doctor doesn't know what a zingo is.

It's been a bit depressing for her here, with all her family gone. But I guess this all confirms that Mel actually was from 80s Earth!

Meanwhile, Kate's offering Donna a job at UNIT! I guess I shouldn't be shocked as it seems like everyone who survives travelling with the Doctor gets employed by them eventually. Tegan, Ace and Martha all joined UNIT after their time as companions.

That's it then I guess, that's Donna's arc completed. She has finally got herself a job that suits her and it was given to her due to a respect for her intelligence. A much more fitting resolution than a lottery win, but then that was supposed to be a consolation prize after a tragic ending.

The Doctor gets the date and location of the first time Stooky Bill was televised and heads for his TARDIS, with Donna coming to join him. Destination: Soho, 1925.

It's always nice to see the actual console room behind the doors instead of a backlit backdrop.

The Doctor acknowledges the extra years the Timeless Child revelation adds to his age, saying that he's a billion years old. This is his excuse for not ever mentioning Mel before, as if he mentioned all his travelling companions he'd be there all day, and he's very busy. He had a similar response when Mel left actually, saying there was no time for her to say a proper goodbye! No time for feelings or processing what he's gone through, there's always something to do.

Donna points out that these three specials have been practically back to back, crisis after crisis without a break, and he always lives like this. Non-stop, for hundreds of years. She thinks that he might look like the Tenth Doctor again because he's worn out. I know how he feels, I've only been writing about Doctor Who for two months and I'm exhausted.

The Doctor changes the subject, wondering where John Logie Baird got Stooky Bill from in the first place. Which brings the episode back to the toy shop at the beginning.

They find the mysterious salesman juggling three balls. In fact, he's always juggling three balls, right through the conversation, no matter how many he throws at the Doctor. And the Doctor's always catching them with utter determination. It's perhaps the most dramatically edited game of catch in science fiction history.
 
The guy tells a story about how ball is the first game ever invented, when a man threw a rock at another man and killed him. The Doctor realises who the shopkeeper is and asks Donna to go back to the TARDIS. Donna helpfully points out that he never asks her to go back to the TARDIS, in case we didn't realise that the line indicates this is serious business. (She's not going anywhere though).

We get a flash to show us who this villain is:
 

It's the Toymaker!

I haven't seen The Celestial Toymaker (most people haven't, it was erased decades ago), but I've read that the 'Celestial' part of the name didn't mean he's from the heavens, it meant he was supposed to be Chinese. That's why he's dressed like a Mandarin.

This episode does nothing to downplay the choices made for the original story, they even went to the trouble of colourising a still from it. Instead, it has him putting on a German accent here, and a French accent when he was dancing in a top hat in the street, showing him to be one of those godlike beings that likes to dress up and roleplay. Which is a pretty normal thing for godlike beings to do actually. I mean look at the Doctor; the guy's always dressing up like he's from Britain and putting on a London accent.

Here's a colourised shot of the First Doctor as well, to show just how long ago he faced this guy. 57 years, for us at least. Though that wasn't their first meeting. According to the Toymaker in The Celestial Toymaker, the first time they met the Doctor had the sense to get out of his lair before he could even play a game with him.

The Doctor was finally roped into a game in The Celestial Toymaker, but the story ended with him solving his puzzle and escaping. And now this time it's the Toymaker that makes a run for it, with the Doctor and Donna following him into the back of the shop.

Oh, an endless row of identical doors. So they're either in a godlike being's nightmare realm, the backrooms of reality, or a hotel. Unfortunately, they're too slow to stop the entrance slamming shut behind them.

The Doctor's blaming himself for the Toymaker being on Earth, as he used salt against their doppelgangers at the end of the universe, but I'd rather believe that he's not really the cause. Just like he's not really to blame for the Flux. He's piling guilt onto himself and making it all his fault.

The poor guy is really running low on confidence at the moment. In fact, he doesn't feel like he's going to be able to win against the Toymaker a second time, because the odds are against him. So Donna mentions something her dad told her: the dice don't know what the dice did last time. Which makes sense! Every game starts from scratch. Well, games of chance anyway.

After running around the doors for a bit the two of them get separated and the Doctor runs into a familiar face.

It's Baird's assistant from the teaser, now turned into a puppet. Though his marionette nature isn't revealed at first as he's all wrapped up. He explains that the Toymaker put a giggle in his head and he played a game against him to make it stop. He lost.

The scene's not the absolute scariest thing in Doctor Who's history, but it shows that the penalty for losing isn't fun.

Oh hey, it's the puppeteer himself, towering above them.

Meanwhile, Donna finds herself up in the roof with Stooky Bill's puppet family.

Stooky Sue comes over talking in rhyme about how she misses her hubby, ever since they set him on fire on TV.

She's got a very unconvincing walk and the production crew went to great effort to achieve this, with four puppeteers controlling her. They were all painted out, just leaving a puppet moving on her own. Her little Stooky Babbies are moving too, as they drop down to kill her like little spider assassins!

Donna isn't keen on having anything on her back, so she flings them off and then tells Stooky Sue a rhyme of her own before smashing her to pieces across the wall! The wee babbies realise that they're not the scariest monster in this room and go shuffling back into the darkness as Donna kicks their mother's head out of the way.

The two are reunited and brought to the Toymaker's puppet show, featuring Puppet Amy Pond! Considerably cheaper than getting Hollywood movie star Karen Gillan back. But where's puppet Rory?

There's nothing fake about this scene. It's a real set, a real puppet, and Neil Patrick Harris is doing real puppeteering. He tells Donna a story about what the Doctor's been up to since she last saw him, which is also handy for all those David Tennant fans who stopped watching when he turned into Matt Smith.

He tells her that Amy Pond was touched by a Weeping Angel and died. The Doctor points out that she actually died of old age.

The Toymaker suddenly puts on his American game show host voice and says "Well, that's all right then!" It's like RTD wanted one scene from this episode to live on in memes forever.

It's a great reply, as yeah Amy (and Rory) lived on just fine until old age. But the Doctor was devastated about being unable to ever visit them again. He got rid of his tweed professor outfit and his whimsical console room and cut himself off from the world.

The Doctor's lived hundreds of years since then, but he can still remember who Nerys is, so all the trauma of losing them still sleeps in his mind. Waiting to come out when he's not finding other things to think about.

The Toymaker does Clara Oswald and Bill Potts next. He doesn't sound all that impressed that Clara died because of a bird, but when the Doctor reveals that she lives on in her final second, well that's all right then!

And Bill was killed by the Cybermen. I was thinking that she got shot through the chest by someone else, though that didn't kill her. It was her final stand against the invading Cybermen that finished her off. But the Doctor reveals that her consciousness survives, which I guess is true whether he knows that she abandoned her broken body and went off with her godlike puddle girlfriend or just knows she was uploaded into Testimony.

Either way, that's all right then!

Next up is the destruction of half the universe due to the Flux, just in case you thought the Chibnall era was being left out. So now Donna knows a little bit about what Not-Thing Donna knew in Wild Blue Yonder. Maybe he can talk about it now.

The Doctor interrupts before anything else can come out however, because he's had enough. Also, the Doctor's power lies in logic and the only time logic applies to the Toymaker is during a game, so there's only one real move he can make here: to challenge him. The Toymaker accepts, not that he has a choice.

While he gets ready the Toymaker mentions that he turned God into a jack-in-the-box, which is very... Twilight Zone. Also damn, the series just Worf'd God! It had him defeated by another threat just to show how strong he is.

It then goes and does the same thing with the Master, saying he's sealed within his gold tooth. And again with The One Who Waits, only backwards this time as it's the only opponent that the Toymaker doesn't dare face. Okay, next season's threat then, I get it.

Also, that's too many teeth.

The Toymaker mentions here that he made a jigsaw out of the Doctor's past, which I guess means he put it together exactly how it used to be, using the picture on the box as a guide.

Before they start, the Doctor wants to know what he did to people. The Toymaker reveals that the game of the 21st century is to shout and type and cancel, so he made everyone think their opinions are right so everyone gets to win. And everyone gets to lose.

The Doctor decides they'll play a simple game of chance with cards. And he loses. Not so jammy after all I guess. Maybe he should've asked him for a puzzle to solve, or something that plays to his strengths, because his luck can be kind of terrible.

We get to see a Toymaker deck though, so that's cool I guess.

But before the Toymaker can claim his prize, the Doctor points out something: he won the first game all those years ago. So it's best of three.
 

They escape the toy shop just in time for it to fold up into a box. So that's a bit unusual. Not entirely unprecedented though, considering what happened to Dan's house in The Halloween Apocalypse.

The Toymaker's waiting for them for the final game in 2023, so they get into the TARDIS and head back.

Back in the present day, UNIT blasts the Korean satellite with the gun on their helipad and... everything goes according to plan. I was expecting this to be a mistake that makes things worse, but nope. I don't think it's saved the world though, so Donna needs to use her ultra-fast typing skills to create a template on the sub-frame, or whatever.

They're trying to detect an elemental force beyond the rules of the universe. Which isn't easy when someone's blasting Spice Girls.

The Toymaker invades the building to the tune of Spice Up Your Life, which has never been my favourite Spice Girls tune, but he seems to like it.

There's something really familiar to me about a godlike antagonist invading the heroes' command centre and doing a bit of a dance, I guess it's just what godlike antagonists do. The Master too, but he's getting kind of outdone here.

It turns out that the Toymaker's got that power where anything he touches turns into Skittles, which two UNIT soldiers discover when they go after him. That's a pretty good effect actually, I'm impressed. Especially as one of the balls falls into Shirley's hands and starts screaming. They're both dead though, murdered. No coming back from that. I'm getting some Everything Everywhere All at Once vibes from this whole thing.

He also does a bit of a dance with Kate, slamming her into a wall, and poor Mel doesn't do any better. I can understand when Kate decides to tell her troops to open fire but Jean-Luc Picard would've been smarter than that.

The soldiers fire, but their bullets turn into a cloud of red petals for the Toymaker to dance in. Damn, UNIT's weapons are at normal effectiveness!

Spice Up Your Life is only 3 minutes long, so everyone here should just relax a bit and let the dude do his dance. It'll give them something to tweet about later. Maybe they could find the song's official music video on YouTube and leave a comment.

See, no one's getting hurt now.

The Toymaker disappears through a hatch in the floor at the end of the song and they try to figure out where he went. They don't have to look far though: he's on the other side of the door.. with their Galvanic Beam.

It's a very big, very powerful Chekhov's gun and it was completely unguarded. Well, okay it was guarded, but they're probably still falling. It's also a real prop that they built to be able to spin around, which is cool.

The Doctor gives the Toymaker the same offer he once gave to the Master: to come with him and play across the universe, to be celestial. But the Toymaker has found enough games on Earth. Games like sports, Tetris and dating. I'm glad this episode didn't turn out to be about how video games in particular are bad. Though I'm not sure how many people are playing games right now while the city is literally burning. I don't think that the Toymaker has really thought this through.

He turns to aim the gun right at the Doctor, who walks over and challenges him to a game. Well, he tries to anyway. The Toymaker shoots him mid-sentence, saying that by his rules he should really be a new Doctor for the next challenge.

The word 'galvanic' can relate to electrical currents generated by chemical reactions, or something sudden or dramatic. I'm thinking that the second meaning is more relevant.

This is the first time that the Doctor's been fatally wounded and regenerated before defeating the villain. Now the next Doctor has to finish the story! I wouldn't want this to happen often, because it's kind of unfair on the current Doctor, but hey Tennant's already had his epic regeneration where he staggers around for hours and says goodbye to everyone, so for once it makes sense.

His previous last words in The End of Time were "I don't want to go," which flipped his catchphrase of 'allons-y', meaning 'let's go." It was kind of clever and I liked how he wasn't putting a brave face on it for once. Though a lot of fans weren't so keen.

This time he says "Here we go again. Allons-y!" Which flips his previous flip and lets Tennant have a more heroic regeneration this time. This time he is ready to go, which is what I always hoped would happen from the moment I heard he was coming back. The regeneration energy starts... and then stops.

And then this happens! He's gotten split into two beings like Superman Red and Blue, who get pulled apart by a companion from the 1963 series and a companion from the 2005 series. Those magic clothes he got when regenerating from Thirteen haven't gotten duplicated though, instead both Doctors get half. And the tie gets magically undone, which bothers me more than it should.

Okay, I have to give the episode credit here. There's a pretty impressive camera shot that goes right over them while they're still stuck together like this. Plus this is all brand new, this has never happened before in Doctor Who.

We've never had David Tennant's Doctor splitting into two Doctors with the same memories right before facing a returning villain from the classic series, with Donna Noble by his side, in an episode written by RTD. Well, except for that time when we did.

Doctor Who (2005) 4-13 - Journey's End

The big difference this time is that the duplicate Doctor is the next incarnation, so he's not going to get dropped off on a parallel world to live a happy life with a returning companion, where we don't have to ever think about him again.

I knew this twist was coming to be honest, because I accidentally saw a spoiler after opening an almost completely unrelated Doctor Who article, but I tried to keep an open mind and now that I've seen how it plays out... I'm not really keen on it. The Toymaker's hyped however, he loves the idea of fighting a man who splits apart instead of dying. In fact, he thinks it's going to keep happening every time he shoots him and... please, no.

The two Doctors challenge him to a game, which is a big epic hero moment, and also something anyone on that roof could do when you think about it. Just challenge him to a coin flip until he loses, job's done. But this time the Doctors decide to play a game of skill instead of chance. They're going to play... catch.

Okay, this is the most dramatically edited game of catch in science fiction history. It's like the fight on the Sycorax spaceship in the sky above London during Tennant's first episode, The Christmas Invasion. Maybe deliberately.

The two Doctors are both very athletic and have excellent reflexes (very young too, seeing as they both regenerated recently), so they're able to keep up with an actual force of nature even when Fifteen gets a bit carried away and almost throws a ball Fourteen can't catch.

It's Fifteen who finally throws the winning shot, so I guess I did get my wish of a regeneration story where the new Doctor is the one who resolves the threat. Kind of.

And that's it, he's defeated. The Fourteenth Doctor claims his prize: to banish him forever. As the Toymaker folds himself away to go back into the box he warns him that his legions are coming. Which is ominous and weird. What legions?

Kate has the box taken away and bound in salt, which I guess seems sensible.

And then a mysterious hand with red nails picks up the gold tooth containing the Master.

Where'd she even come from? How did she know the Master was in a tooth? How does she know how to get him out again? How do you even trap someone in a tooth?

Doctor Who (2005) 3-13 - Last of the Time Lords

Also, c'mon, we did this one already! They're even using clips of the Master's evil laugh again. The dude's not Ming the Merciless.

Is it going to cut to Jesus picking up God's jack-in-the-box now? No? Okay.

Cut to the Fourteenth Doctor showing the Fifteenth Doctor where everything is on the TARDIS console. Which makes absolutely no sense, unless he's got post-regeneration amnesia or it's actually David Tennant showing Ncuti Gatwa the set. Also, Fifteen still hasn't put any trousers on.

There's another subtle echo of The Christmas Invasion here, as Fifteen basically gets Fourteen to quit by saying 'don't you think you look tired?' He tells him the same thing Donna has been saying, that mentally he's a mess because for the whole series he's never stopped.

I mean apart from all the times he did, like when Thirteen spent years in prison, or when Twelve was a teacher for decades, or when Eleven settled down at Trenzalore for centuries... which did suffer frequent invasions to be fair. There was that unusually long night Twelve spent with River Song as well. The episode doesn't mention any of this, but it does list some of the things the Doctor's been through during his millennia of (near) constant adventuring.

• His trial (The War Games, The Trial of a Time Lord)
• His exile (Third Doctor era)
• The Key to Time (The Key to Time)
• The devastation of Logopolis (Logopolis)
• Adric's death (Earthshock)
• River Song's death (Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead)
• Sarah Jane's death
  
• The Time War
• The Pandorica (The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang)
• Mavic Chen (The Daleks' Master Plan)
• The Gods of Ragnarok (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy)

Then Fifteen says something interesting. He says that he's fine because Fourteen fixed himself. So Fifteen properly comes after Fourteen then? The bi-regeneration basically dragged him backwards in time? Either way, Donna's figured out the actual reason why the Doctor got his old face back: it was his subconscious telling him to go home and spend some time healing.

Fourteen can't be at peace without his TARDIS though, so Fifteen pulls a mallet out of a hatch in the floor like he knew it was there all along, hits the TARDIS, and makes a second one appear next to it! Pretty much explicitly using cartoon magic. It's his prize for beating the Toymaker, apparently.

I guess if you're going to clone the TARDIS, actual godlike powers is the way to do it. Not much room for me to complain about plausibility there. (And I love the music we get during this scene).

It's not an exact clone however, as this one has a wheelchair ramp! No one actually uses it, they're just showing it off, but it probably made a lot of fans happy.

Shirley makes a quip, saying "At last! You finally caught up with the 21st century!" and it bothers me way more than an extremely tame joke made by his friend should do. I just don't like it when the series treats the Doctor and the TARDIS as if they're a product of their time, when they're not even a product of this planet. It'd be like if the Doctor landed in 1923 and opened the little hatch to show off the phone inside, and someone went 'Finally! Welcome to the 20th century!"

I'd be absolutely fine with it if Fourteen had invited Shirley into his TARDIS and opened up the ramp, because that would imply that it was there all along, but now they've made a statement that it wasn't! Here's something positive to balance my whining: I like Shirley and I hope she shows up more in the future.

Well, the inside looks the same, but there's a jukebox. Is this the TARDIS from the future or something? Did he do that thing that Rassilon did in The Five Doctors that made it so everyone could walk into Five's TARDIS but then fly off in their own? Why is this episode being so confusing? Am I supposed to be happy about the way this is going? Do they both have the mysterious watch hidden inside the console with all their stolen memories?

Donna says that Fifteen's the older Doctor because he came after him, so there's more evidence to him being a regeneration who got brought back in time, and this being the future TARDIS. Keep the evidence coming please!

The important thing is: the Fifteenth Doctor's theme is playing and it's pretty damn great. Eleven's theme was built for daring fairytale adventure, Twelve's theme was dark, dramatic and determined, Thirteenth's theme was bright and synthy, Fourteen's theme was... Ten's theme, I guess? Now Fifteenth's theme is all swagger and energy.

Fifteen kicks his kid self out of the TARDIS so he can race off and have fun, but he salutes him as he leaves, which is weird. He's not typically a fan of saluting.

So Doctor 2023 goes off to a Christmas special and many seasons to come, while Doctor 2005 stops running and retires to live with Donna's family... his family. He's finally getting to have the one adventure he thought he could never have. Even if it will drive him mad to stay in one place.

Well, relatively one place. He has taken Rose on a trip to Mars. And Mel to New York. But neither of them ended up in a Doctor Who adventure, so I guess the TARDIS has retired for the time being as well. It brought him right to Donna in The Star Beast, so it's already taken him where he needs to be.

You can tell that he's finally putting being the Doctor aside for a while. The shirt's back, but the one last button on his waistcoat that's been heroically holding it together has finally been undone. He seems happier already, making jokes. He also mentions that Wilf's busy shooting moles, but assures them that the moles are fine as he gave them a forcefield.

10-11: World Enough and Time

Anyone else you feel like giving forcefields to Doctor?

It turns out that Mel's been invited over as well, so she's also part of their family. With Sylvia being the evil stepmother!

It's funny how Donna spent all that time looking for the Doctor so she could escape her normality and share his adventures. Now he's found her to escape his adventures and share her normality. Basically what Donna said in the Toymaker's corridor maze was right: she did end up saving him this time.

So Rose and Donna both got a Tennant in the end and poor Martha didn't. Well, I suppose there's still time.

And the episode ends with Fifteen flying off to find adventure and hopefully a pair of trousers.


CONCLUSION

---

There have been many responses to the Timeless Child reveal. Anger, denial, curiosity. Russell T Davies' response was "Hold my beer".

I mean, there are some important basics to Doctor Who. He's a Time Lord from Gallifrey, he travels through time in a blue box called the TARDIS which is bigger on the inside, and every incarnation is the same person. Well, at least we still have the TARDIS. Maybe. The ambiguity makes it worse really, as I can't be satisfied by a resolution when I'm not even sure what happened.

To be fair there's nothing ambiguous on Fourteen's side of the story. Everything in these specials was designed to give him a brilliant emotionally-satisfying conclusion that I never saw coming. I was sure he was going to be one of the shortest-lived incarnations, even more than Ten, so him getting an actual happy ending is pretty amazing. For once a regeneration story doesn't rip out your heart. The episode brings back elements of the 1963 series to give the 2005 series a true wrap-up, finally giving us the proper 60th Anniversary Special I was waiting for. I was already sold on the idea of bringing back RTD, David Tennant and Catherine Tate, I didn't need convincing, but the episode went and convinced me anyway. Without them, this story couldn't exist, and the story spends its time reminding us why they're so beloved.

The trouble is that the episode throws Ncuti Gatwa's Fifteen under the bus! RTD can tell us he's the real Doctor and the TARDIS is the real TARDIS all he wants, but the events on screen make it hard for me to feel that. One Doctor looks like David Tennant, hangs around with the Doctor's previous companions, has the TARDIS, and suffers the trauma of previous adventures, the other Doctor pulls a giant mallet out of nowhere and smacks the TARDIS to make a magic duplicate with a jukebox. He comes across like a clone manifested by the Toymaker's dimension. Either way, he's a separate entity now: a new man sauntering away. Doctor 14B. Unless he's not.

There are two lines that give me hope. One about Fifteen being fine because Fourteen fixes himself, the other about Fifteen coming after Fourteen. They make it seem like he's a future Doctor pulled back in time instead of a separate person, in contradiction to everything we see on screen. On the other hand, RTD's been making comments about previous Doctors being split by the Toymaker's magic as well, and it makes me think that he really considers them to be separate people that end up living their own lives. Like I said, it's vague and confusing, and that's never satisfying to me.

You know what was good though? Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker. He absolutely nailed the role, which couldn't have been easy with all the things he was asked to do. Puppeteering, shuffling, dancing, dodgy accents. I liked that RTD took the potentially offensive aspects of his original appearance and made them into a virtue, using a slight shift of context to make something that appeared dated now seem extremely relevant. Basically, the dude's a troll who gets joy out of seeing other people lose, whether he's defeating them in games or owning them in conversation. An especially cruel version of the trickster god archetype that uses the internet to encourage everyone's worst impulses for the lols. Not that he has to try too hard, which the script makes a point of drawing attention to.

All three specials have had a different tone, which I liked, though this definitely strayed back into creepy at times. There are some actual great moments in this as well, like Donna destroying Stooky Sue, "Well that's all right then!", and the soldiers turning into screaming balls during Spice Up Your Life. Ending with an epic game of catch was definitely a choice, but it kind of works. The Doctor's first game (in The Celestial Toymaker) was a puzzle, the second was a game of chance, so it makes sense the third would be a physical challenge. Plus it calls back to the resolution of David Tennant's first story, bookending his run on Doctor Who and tying up the 2005 series with a bow so we can move into a new era.


Anniversary story ranking so far:

---

1. The Day of the Doctor (10)
2. The Night of the Doctor (8)
3. Wild Blue Yonder (7)
4. The Giggle (7)
   
5. The Three Doctors (6)
   
6. The Five Doctors (6)
   
7. Silver Nemesis (6)
8. The Star Beast (6)
   

This one was a proper anniversary special, so it definitely deserves to be on the list. But I think it deserves to be a little lower than Wild Blue Yonder. Partly because Wild Blue Yonder is generally really good, but also that bi-generation twist really puts a downer on the whole thing for me. The idea was to avoid all the negative emotions that come with a regeneration, but the end result for me is negative emotions. Russell T Davies even knew it would annoy fans and he did it anyway.

I mean I've never been sad after a regeneration story. The Doctor is rejuvenated and walks away with fresh enthusiasm... before falling out of a burning TARDIS or whatever. That's really happy! All I wanted here was for Ncuti Gatwa to explicitly say "I remember being you, all of it, even the days you haven't lived yet... and also this is my TARDIS from the future," and I would've been satisfied.

---

COMING SOON?

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's probably going to be Doctor Who's 2023 Christmas special, The Church on Ruby Road! Unless I decide to do something different.

Please leave a comment if doing so would bring you joy. Oh, also, Merry Christmas!