Gryphonic

From a high level, it looks to be fairly simple – and I’m reviewing both episodes as the one story here: The Rani is back, and she wants to resurrect Omega to obtain Time Lord DNA in order to rebuild Gallifrey (surely not the whole planet?) and Time Lord society.  In order to do this, she’s got a scheme where she is going to use the fact that the Doctor had ‘awoken’ the Pantheon, find a child that can bring wishes to life, and then – as if the world is a giant rubber band stretched to it’s limit – twang it a few times with ‘doubt’ so that it eventually snaps so that she can find Omega hidden in the Underverse. She needs to make use of the Doctor and use his doubt to help with this ‘twanging’ (really, I tried to think of a better word here) because as a Time Lord (or something) he’d be the most efficient with it perhaps.

One of the personal head-canons that I’ve got about the show is that while Time Lords can jump forward and backward in time however they want, they still encounter each other in a single progressing time line. I’m sure that this has been blown to bits in novels, audio plays, and the like, but at least within the realm of the TV show (and the Sacred Timeline – wait, that’s Marvel… One True Timeline?) this has generally been an unwritten rule… because of how time actually works in the real world where Folks Like What Us Live.

What I’m getting at here is that the Rani could not started this plan anywhere before the 14th Doctor ‘open the door’ to the Pantheon in Wild Blue Yonder.

Right, so that’s the setup. How was the execution of this?

Absolutely messy, fast moving, and yet fraught with questions that were either unanswered completely or unsatisfactorily.

The Rani doesn’t have a TARDIS. Apparently the Doctor has the only TARDIS in the universe. Instead she has a Time Ring. We saw the 4th Doctor with one of these along with Sarah and Harry at the end of Genesis of the Daleks, and it appeared to be a somewhat limited bit of Time Lord technology. Yet somehow the Rani was able to use this to get to specific points in time – as Mrs. Flood to be the neighbours of Ruby Sunday and Belinda Chandra, as well as heading back to Bavaria to pick up the Baby Desidirium. Not just that, but somehow she managed to collect a bunch of the ‘Daft Punk’ type robots from Harmony Station, as well as the Seekers to populate the Bone Palace with. Not just that, but she managed to pick up technology to give her that little flying scooter as well as a transmat device. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for that device.

For the Baby Desidirium, there’s a bunch of questions there too. Such as how did the Rani know where to find him? How did she know how to ‘use’ him? For that matter, how did anyone automatically know how to ‘use’ him, since Ruby and the Doctor both knew. Perhaps holding him and being close enough was enough to somehow let people know, I suppose.

Let’s touch for a moment too on how some members of the cast were totally underused this story.

Belinda: For most of the first episode she’s stuck at home being the “Good little wife” and “Good little mother”, and then once arrested really doesn’t know what’s happening. Then in the second episode she’s just, “I can’t leave my daughter”, then “Hurrah, my daughter is safe” whiplashing into “What daughter, let’s go to Neptune!” and finally, “I’m back to the daughter I was originally trying to get back to always. Don’t you remember? I kept telling you about her.” — aside from the fact that no, you never did say anything or even implied it about having a daughter.  Wasn’t Varada Sethu meant to be the companion here in this season? Didn’t feel like it for this story; she was very much pushed to the side and Ruby given the heavy lifting.

Mel: All Mel was there for was just to give a little exposition on the Rani and how she faced her before. That was it. She contributed nothing else.

Rogue: Just there to tell the Doctor that “tables don’t do that” and “find me”. That’s it. Nothing else. Who knows if the Doctor ever will at this point.

Rosie, Donna’s daughter: Other than some brief tech stuff with Ruby, which could have been done by someone else, there was no point to her even being there.

Susan: A blink and you miss it pop up on one of the screens, and that’s IT. Not even a line for Carol Ann Ford this story. RTD is probably giggling madly that he made fans think that Susan would be coming back this story.

In fact, I can totally imagine both The Vast Toffee (MN) and RTD cackling madly in whatever room they wrote scripts in thinking, “Ooh, I’m so clever! Hee hee! This will make the fans lose their minds. Oh, and what a clever story I wrote! All these things that I can call back to!”

Honestly, Moffett did a far better job of that in his finales than RTD has recently. You could go back and rewatch an episode to see something that was called back to by the finale hiding in plain sight. I rather get the feeling that RTD tried to do that here, but actually didn’t hide anything.

Specifically with the whole Poppy storyline. First she’s the Doctor and Belinda’s daughter, who apparently came out of Conrad’s Wish. This is tried to be explained by ’scraps of memories’ being used by the Doctor (seeing Poppy in Space Babies) and Belinda… presumably seeing her in Lagos. Except no-one else saw her there. It was a mystery as to why she had been seen and only Belinda. Also, why would Belinda see the exact same child? Then all of this gets that big retcon I mentioned earlier about Poppy now being the daughter that Belinda always had (yet never mentioned, or even hinted to).  If there had been breadcrumbs about this through the course of these season, then I could have accepted it. Yet there were none and that’s why I think that this retconning is just so sloppy.

Stepping back slightly to before that point, we get the Doctor going off on his mission to “fix the universe and restore one person”. To be honest here, up until that point – which was pretty much edging up to the 50 minute mark of the 2nd episode – it looked like this was going to be a wonderful cliffhanger that might have led us into a third season with Ncuti. From this point where he got back into the TARDIS to go off and do that, the whole episode made an absolute hard turn tonally, and it felt like this was something else bolted on. There’s been much speculation as to what was going to happen with Ncuti after this season; whether he’d stay or go. The way that the back 20 minutes ended up, it felt like it was a hefty re-write to handle a regeneration.

Sure, it was wonderful to see a completely unexpected return of Jodie here. I miss her portrayal of the Doctor so much, and still feel that she was never given enough to shine with. Even this brief bit made me want more of her.

Regeneration used to be something special. Something rare. Something we only got when it was time to say “good bye” to one Doctor and “hello” to a new one. Yet recently it’s felt like whenever there’s a problem that needs a bunch of power to fix, let’s use regeneration. After all, now that the Doctor is the Timeless Child we have infinite amounts of regeneration to play with. This Doctor used it to defeat Lux, and now it’s suddenly this all powerful force to “shift reality by one degree”. It’s now more of a magic “Get Out of a Plot Hole Free” card than the Sonic Screwdriver!

Not just that, but “stunt regenerations”. While we were pleased to see Tennant back as the 14th Doctor (presumably, “The Other Guy” that 15 referred to 13 about), that had the hallmarks of “stunt” casting; bring a lead actor back that resonated with a large part of the fan base that grew up with the 2005 revival, along with the returning showrunner who a large number of people felt that it would help “right the ship”, we now have 15 regenerating into something that is wearing Billie Piper’s appearance. I’m saying ’something’ because it’s been very deliberate for the show not to call her the Doctor. There was no announcement welcoming Billie as the new Doctor from official BBC channels, and the credits just said “Introducing Billie Piper”, without the “as the Doctor” that every new Doctor has had since the 2005 revival.  Shenanigans are afoot, most assuredly. Yet we have no idea when (hopefully when, not if) we’ll get answers to that.

*sigh* I’m sorry, this has turned into another long ranty post again. I’ll start to finish up with some closing, unanswered questions:

1. Why did the Rani name the baby Sturn-und-Drang (Storm and Stress, this translates to). Why not just name him Desidirium then and there?

2. What did the Rani wish for at the end of the scene in Bavaria?

3. How did Rogue manage to contact the Doctor from that Hell dimension?

4. How come Anita’s master key open doors in mid-air? That pretty much went away from everything we understood about the Time Hotel setup, where a door on the other side was needed.

5. Why could we not leave the Vlinx boxed up?

6. Why did Mel drive her scooter on to the UNIT ‘bridge’? Why could she not have just parked it before taking the elevator?

7. If Mel was a housewife, who was she married to?

8. Not a question, but the idea of having a ship’s wheel on the UNIT ‘bridge’ to turn the top half of the building was just dumb.

9. Speaking of dumb, the fire trails that Shirley’s wheelchair made was also stupid.

10. How did the Doctor know that the Rani had that hover cycle?

11. Why did taking the hover cycle through the Chronic Beam deactivate the Threshold?

12. Why was Ruby’s memory different from everyone else’s? Not even the Doctor seemed to know that!

13. Who is ’The Boss’ that Anita was referring to?

14. Finally, if now there are various changes to this world given that everything has been ‘reset’ from the Wish World, does that finally mean that “Mavity” is no longer a thing? (I really hope so)

Okay, I think that will do it. I’ve certainly got more things about this story that bothered me, but I’m done for now.