Ascension of the Cybermen/The Timeless Children

[purplecat]

I didn't like it.

My problem is that the reasons I didn't like this two parter fall into "things I feel strongly but suspect will get over in time" and "things which I think were objectively rather poor but would happily over-look in a Doctor Who story I otherwise liked".

My thinking after several days is still somewhat disjointed, so I'm going to do the notes version of this.

1. I was uncharacteristically anxious throughout all of this. Particularly Ascension of the Cybermen. I think some of it was the rumours that one or more of the Fam were to leave. This is interesting in that it means I'm fonder of the Fam than I thought I was, but also I think is because it feels like none of the Fam have really reached a natural end point in their story. I don't like being anxious while watching Doctor Who, though presumably now I know where all this is going I won't be anxious next time I watch it.
   
2. A corollary to this is that it's felt all series like the interactions between the Fam and the Doctor were going somewhere but there was no real resolution to that. I'm not even clear if the Fam are still part of the show or not? I mean they have a Tardis House right? so maybe? probably?
   
3. A big part of my objection to the big reveal boils down to "but looms"* which is weird because a) The looms are not actually directly contradicted here and b) I always thought they were a silly idea anyway. Still - "but looms".
   
4. Actually I suspect "but looms" is acting as a surrogate around a set of feelings that fitting the novels into the overall continuity of Doctor Who is basically a lost cause at this point. One could argue its been a lost cause since Human Nature but I'd been managing via a mixture of vigorous squinting and denial to pretend that it ALL FITTED INTO ONE GLORIOUS WHOLE. I think The Timeless Children broke this.
   
5. I'm not keen on the idea that the Doctor is somehow super-special by birth, on the other hand that's not what The Timeless Children said - only that she was the originator of the Time Lord ability to regenerate which isn't actually the same thing.
   
6. "Everything you think you know is a lie" - seriously? I mean even before the episode aired I was muttering contrarily "well I suppose 2 plus 2 still equals 4" but I was suspecting something far more radical than that the Time Lords had been lying about where they got regeneration from and that the Doctor had previous lives she had forgotten. I was expecting something much more explicitly along the lines of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (i.e., that Gallifreyan "civilisation" not only originated in exploitation of the Timeless Child but was maintained by continued exploitation of The Timeless Children) with a side possibility that whole swathes of the Doctor's past might turn out to be a dream or fantasy of some kind.
   
7. Why Timeless Children plural? Did I miss something?
   
8. Still don't like Gallifrey getting destroyed again. I mean, I understand all the reasons why you might from a story perspective want to destroy Gallifrey, but it has been done.
   
9. I also don't really like the Master's reversion to Simm-Master like giggling-evil-madness. In particular, I don't like the fact that this is done without any acknowledgement of where Missy ended up. Of course, events yet planned could resolve some of this.
   
10. Not that Sacha Dhawan isn't very pretty to look at.
    
11. I did like the bit where he shrunk Ashad. The moment Ashad explained the Cyberium could only be accessed if he was killed we all went "Uh Oh! Bad Move." It was such a Master-like moment and underlined how very dangerous the Master is.
    
12. Seemed a bit of a waste of Ashad though.
    
13. In general the whole Lone Cyberman thing in retrospect feels more like hype than anything genuinely dangerous. It wasn't clear the Cyberium actually made that much difference to Ashad's ability to lead the Cybermen. It also wasn't really clear to me how Jack was involved and why he chose to specifically warn the Doctor against giving the Lone Cyberman what it wanted - unless wibbley-wobbley timey-wimey wait for next season to resolve.
    
14. Also what was Ashad doing to the Cybermen when he was apparently torturing them? I assumed he was restoring emotion but apparently not.
    
15. I wanted the Ruth Doctor to be season 6B. Obviously this is not directly contradicted here but still.
    
16. Tame Layman very smug. "I always thought those faces were the Doctor's in The Brain of Morbius" he said. Which is a lie, he didn't even know about the faces until we watched it in the Randomiser and I explained both the production intention and fan theorising to him. Tame Layman being unnecessarily smug isn't the story's fault mind, though one does wonder at the wisdom of hanging your central plot point off a fan argument from the 1980s.
    
17. I see all the descriptions of what the Doctor was doing in The Timeless Children but it still feels like she spent most of the episode being exposited to.
    
18. Actually, while the Fam was once again rather side-lined. I thought their sub-plot worked pretty well. I particularly liked the moment when they all dressed up as Cyberman and rescued the human whose name I have forgotten.
    
19. Shows should be very wary of painting their protagonists into a corner where "you must kill the few to save the many" - it doesn't really add complexity to your character so much as give them some rather predictable angst. Doctor Who, in my opinion, should be doubly careful of this since its is built into the character of the Doctor that they generally find a terribly clever option 3. Doing this twice in three episodes is not, in my opinion, a good look.
    
20. So the whole Brendan thing was the Doctor having weird flashbacks as the events of Ascension of the Cybermen unfolded. Did I understand that correctly? Because that wasn't at all how it seemed during the actual episode.
    
21. Though, you know, I quite like the way it ties into the Doctor's repeated desire to be ginger.
    
22. What is the point of setting up The Division as something significant if you've just wiped out Gallifrey (again)? Corollary: Gallifrey would probably be more interesting as war-torn with survivors and secret societies hiding in the ruins than scoured of all organic life. Though Gallifrey would probably be even better just quietly forgotten about for a few years.
    
23. Err... so where did all the humans who crossed the Boundary go? Is this also going to be explained later?
    

*The looms were an invention of the Virgin New Adventures. Time Lords are not born but loomed on, umm, looms. At one point a mysterious founding Time Lord called The Other who may (or may not) have been half human on his mother's side threw himself into the looms. At some point later he may (or may not) have been re-loomed as The Doctor.


I have a feeling that this is a story I will re-evaluate and feel rather different about once both the new ideas have settled and the unanswered questions have been either answered or allowed to lie a bit. But it's rare for me to both quite strongly dislike a Doctor Who story while feeling that quality-wise it's not that bad, even if I struggle to feel it is actually all that good.

Comments

[magister]

It's pretty much something where the individual pieces are good, but don't quite fit together.

Previous humans through the boundary have gone to random places - the boundary never shows the same place twice. Which allows one of my favourite pieces of duff dialogue when Obi Wan Kenockoff, having already said that the boundary never shows the same place Twice, peers at Gallifrey in mild surprise and mutters, "Well, it's never looked like that before."

And a suggestion on how to solve the problem of the Dr's passivity.

Season starts with Master trying to kill Dr. It's revealed that the Master has been retained by Gallifrey and told the Dr has gone off the deep end and is now dangerous and that he can have Precious Things if he offs her.

Further revealed that Dr has stumbled upon something leading to the truth about the Timeless Child - let's say her memory wipe is starting to give way and she's getting flashbacks. Or she's just run into Dr Ruth and that's prompted her to start digging.

Dr manages to convince Master he's been had. Uneasy alliance to discover the truth - they break into the Matrix, discover all, Master goes mad and destroys Gallifrey, while Dr fights to stop him.

This way, the Doctor has agency and destruction of Gallifrey is something she witnesses and fails to stop, rather than something related to her.

As it stands, it feels oddly as if the roles have been switched - the Master is off exploring and discovering, rather than the Doctor.

[purplecat]

Yes, it does feel very odd that The Doctor, while moping about Gallifrey, hasn't actually been trying to figure out what the Master was going on about. It would feel much more Doctor-ish if she'd been actively investigating this big secret that was supposed to be at the heart of Gallifrey.

[nostalgia]

I see your "but LOOOOOMS" because I say "but half human"

[purplecat]

Interesting! I wasn't so hung-up on the half-human thing but that may be because I spent a week in the middle assuming that the humans who crossed the boundary became Time Lord ancestors. Which I don't now think is the case, but I hadn't really noticed that.

Clearly humans eventually evolve regeneration and the Doctor has been human all along!

[nostalgia]

LOOOOOOMed from a human!

[purplecat]

Ooh! Yes, maybe the whole mind wipe regression to childhood thing is really just the Time Lords dumping the Doctor into the looms and then relooming them.

IT ALL FITS!

[nostalgia]

its all very silly!

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what to make of this, even more so than my current attempt not to form an opinion on new Who until a second viewing. I felt like most of my energy was spent on trying very hard not to care about the retcon, mostly because it felt like Chibnall was deliberately trolling old-style fans like me and I didn't want to fall for it. I don't really believe in 'canon' these days, and I think a lot of what was said isn't actually irreconcilable with traditional continuity if you try hard enough, but I couldn't see what the point of it all was, beyond, "What if the real founder of Gallifrey wasn't pale, stale, male Rassilon, but a woman?"

And I confess that I also like 60s Who where the Doctor was some guy flying through time and space and not a quasi-mythic figure of importance to the universe, but I think that boat sailed a very long time ago.

I suppose I was unconsciously expecting the Omelas thing too.

I thought Timeless Children plural was about the Doctor being a child more than once. Or was it about the augmented Cyber-Time Lords? Or both, or neither?

I don't like the destruction of Gallifrey either (as you say, it's been done), but as the Time Lord bodies are in deep freeze, and the Time Lord consciousnesses are in the Matrix, I suspect it's only a matter of time before someone thinks of downloading the one into the other...

Agreed about Jack. I also felt Ashad was kind of wasted, but I'm not really such a Cybermen fan anyway. And agreed about Brendan, which I thought was heading somewhere much more interesting.

The Fam pretending to be Cybermen was reasonably good, but brought back bad memories of Attack of the Cybermen.

I think the humans who crossed the boundary went to different places, it was the Master who rigged it to go to Gallifrey, but I could be wrong about that.

Which is a lie, he didn't even know about the faces until we watched it in the Randomiser

Um, maybe that's "Everything you know is a lie!" ;-)

[purplecat]

In principle I don't object to retcons and reinterpretations - particularly in something as long-running as Doctor Who, but something about this one I really don't care for - and maybe it is that its really not all that obvious what it adds (beyond opening up a whole load of pre-Unearthly Child storytelling space which is definitely a nice thing - certainly for Big Finish).

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

I wrote a whole big thing for my Doctor Who blog which I couldn't post (I seem to be locked out...) saying basically this: that previous retcons have added something either to the series or at least told a good story, but here it's hard to see what it adds even to this particular story, let alone the whole series.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

Oh, one last thing. Philip MacDonald wrote in a DWM special years ago that the whole Cartmen Masterplan thing basically boiled down to "the Doctor wasn't a mysterious Time Lord as we thought, but a completely different mysterious Time Lord!" (quote from memory, but that was the gist) It feels a bit as if Chris Chibnall has fallen into the same trap.

[purplecat]

Yes! That's a neat way of putting it.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Philip Purser-Hallard suggests that the Master was absent from an earlier version of the story (and Sacha Dhawan was only approached to do this story some time after making Spyfall). The Master's role was perhaps (I suggest rather than Philip) assembled from storylines originally intended for Ashad and the Doctor, who becomes less proactive as a result.

[purplecat]

That's interesting. I can certainly believe that Ascension of the Cybermen was originally building to a rather different second half - and in fact that The Timeless Children consisted primarily of the Doctor being exposited to by the Master may be indicative of a rushed script rewrite where originally she was taking a more proactive/investigative approach.

The more I think about it, the more I feel what we got in The Timeless Children was not as interesting as was hinted in the run-up, but I'm not sure I can yet articulate very well where I feel it fell short.