An entire story driven by in universe and real incompetence.
This story picks up where the last episode left off, with
the Doctor having given away the weird sentient goo, turning up on a war torn
planet to clean up her mess.
And boy does she suck at cleaning up a mess. This is
apparently the same character who could turn an enemies armies around with a
speech. The same character who could weaponise their surroundings to fight the
very same villain. The same character who could perform trillions of calculations
within milliseconds, in order to win a fight.
So it should come as no surprise that the Doctor’s clever
defences are overwhelmed by ‘cyberdrones’ within seconds of the erected and she
simply panics and tells everyone to run away. Bear in mind that this was her
plan; she had time to draw on her thousands of years of warfare experience and
come up with a rock solid plan of attack.
Placing this swift defeat of the Doctor in the context of
the show as a whole, makes her seem significantly weaker and less intelligent
then her predecessors.
Having the Doctor panic and simply say things like ‘they’re
attacking our defences’ makes her seem plainly incompetent. Also, who is she
saying this to? Did she think that her ‘fam’ didn’t notice that all the weird
looking machines were being shot at? Did Chibnall think that the audience
couldn’t figure out what was going on in front of us?
This scene was supposed to establish the Cybermen as a
threat that can match the Doctor. However, it’s driven entirely by the Doctor
being incompetent, rather than caught off guard and seems to suggest that
Thirteen lost a lot of IQ points in the regeneration.
Also, is Seth McFarlane watching this, because Doctor Who
just ripped off the drones from The Orville?
The ‘fam’ gets separated (through further incompetence) with
Yas and Graham driving their part of the story through poor decision making and
the Doctor and Ryan doing the same. There are other characters, but Chibnall
doesn’t care enough to give them personalities, making them pretty obvious
red-shirts.
Tosin Cole continues to phone in his performance throughout.
I’m honestly not sure whether he’s a bad actor or whether he’s realised he’s in
a bad show.
Mandeep Gil is endlessly annoying as Yas, but I’d put this
more down to the writing and directing. She’s playing Yas like a pseudo-Doctor
in this episode (clearly a writing choice) but we’ve never seen her do this
before. With previous companions we’ve seen them progress from being out of
their depth to being familiar with the Doctor’s lifestyle. The writing room
treats the whole cast as tools for their plots rather than characters, so Yas
has changed week on week depending on what the story needs her to do.
This results in her act of taking charge in this episode
seeming like a bumbling idiot who read about how to survive an alien attack
online and thinks they know everything. This type of arrogance literally got
Clara killed in ‘Face the Raven’ but since the story needs Yas to survive, I’m
sure it’ll just be the red shirts who bite the bullet.
Anyway, The Doctor, Ryan and a red-shirt find their way to a
planet occupied by space-Barristan Selmy who protects a portal to Gallifrey.
And then the Master jumps through and promptly demonstrates another area of
writing that Chibnall is really bad at.
Remember in ‘World Enough and Time’ when Missy pointed out
that Bill and Nadole were just there to provide comic relief and exposition. That
wasn’t a simple case of her breaking the fourth-wall; it fit with her character
in-universe, it was said casually so only the older viewers would notice it and
it wouldn’t confuse the younger ones. But, above all, it was earned by the
character development and story.
Sasha Dhawan jumping out of a portal and saying ‘that was a
good entrance wasn’t it’ has been in no way earned by Chibnall. He has not
developed this character or built up enough good faith with the fanbase to get
away with trying to joke about how obviously forced the Master’s “dramatic
entrance” was.
Oh and in the meantime of this episode an immortal Irishman
has been doing Immortal Irishman things. The writing elsewhere was so bad that
I don’t even care about who he turns out to be.
We’re coming to the end of series, where things will
apparently change forever.
Chris Chibnall is not the right person to make a radical
change to a franchise like this.
Maybe ‘change forever’ means being cancelled and coming back
in five years as a couple of Netflix specials.
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