I would call this lazy writing, but I think you actually
have to work pretty hard to come up with something this bad.
Does everyone remember the War Doctor; played by John Hurt (created
purely out of necessity as Christopher Eccleston didn’t want to come back) and
slotted into the Doctor’s timeline in the gap between Eight and Nine.
Well turns out Moffatt doing things like that just
encouraged Chris Chibnall to see if he could do something more game changing.
However, as has come up quite a lot, Chris Chibnall is a
terrible writer and Steven Moffatt is not.
So let’s tackle the minor things first:
·
The support characters are better actors than
the main cast.
·
Tosin Cole doesn’t know how to act.
·
Graham has a heart-to-heart with Yas in which he
sings her praises, whilst talking about someone who is most definitely not Yas.
·
The Master’s plan is stupidly predictable.
·
The Cyber-Masters look ridiculous.
·
The entire cast keeps up the tradition of
stating the obvious, due to Chibnall not understanding the television is a
visual story-telling process.
Now, the big universe
shift.
The Doctor has been the first Time Lord all along and has
had her memory erased to keep her from knowing. Also she has no limits to her
regenerations as that was something her adopted mother imposed after stealing
her genes.
Erm, does anyone remember when Eleven aged to death in his
final episode. His body was worn out (like One’s) and he couldn’t regenerate
because he had no life cycles left.
Anyway, we now know where the Jo Martin Doctor came from;
she was from a previous set of Doctors that was erased from her memory.
Err, Chibs…if she pre-dates William Hartnell why does the
Martin-Doctor have Hartnell’s Tardis? Why would this Doctor even be the
“Doctor”? That was a name that the First Doctor adopted as his alias on Earth.
Why would a previous version of the same person have arrived at the same alias?
It would have made more sense for the Master to have been
the Timeless Child.
This would have explained why he was so pissed off when he
found out about it.
He spends lifetimes knowing he was the Master; of feeling
superior to others for reasons he can’t explain and being consistently shunned
by Rassilon and the High Council. Then he finds out that he is the source of
all of the Time Lords’ power; that they are derived from him and by rights he
should stand above them as their creator; their Master.
It would explain where the Master gets his instinctive sense
of superiority from; the unconscious knowledge that he is the most powerful
Time Lord in the universe.
You could even work the previous Doctor story-line into it,
by saying that the Doctor has been resurrected before as he/she has been shown
to be able to stop the Master’s plans. Their childhoods could have been manufactured
to always keep them close, so that every version of the Doctor would always
develop a deep knowledge of the Master, that he/she needed to give him/her the
edge in a fight.
And that would by why the Doctor was the only other Time Lord
that the Master left alive; he’d want to defeat her last to make sure she knew
that she was literally created for him. A final slap in the face to the person
who foiled all his plans.
This version even fits better with the Doctor’s speech at
the end about how he can’t rob her of her identity. I mean what’s going to give
you more of an identity crisis, learning that you’re a walking god or learning
that your literal life’s purpose is to keep an eye on one of your high school
friends?
And it works better with the Jo Martin Doctor; the thing she
did wrong could have been to abandon her duty, creating a chain of events that
the Time Lord’s foresaw would lead to the Master discovering his true nature.
Gatt’s mission was to bring the Doctor back, wipe her memory and place her back
in the timeline in a place that would avert the Master’s eventual discovery.
However, the intervention of Thirteen, which was caused by
the fact that she had no memory of the Martin-Doctor meant that Gatt’s mission
failed. The Time Lords undid themselves with their hubris and their process of
recreating the Doctor backfired as Thirteen could have worked out what was
going on if she’d had the memories they took.
But…instead we get some half-baked excuse that the Master
can’t stand the idea that he is derived from the Doctor.
This is just plain bad writing; a contrivance used to
justify character actions that don’t make sense.
Anyway, the Master creates some hilariously bad looking
Cyber-Masters but they’re all destroyed by Space-Barristan Selmy. Apparently he
was the one who sent the cyber goo back in time in the first place. So, among
all other things, we have to admit that Space-Joffrey was right to dismiss him
from the Kingsguard; on the grounds that he was too old and had lost his wits.
Barristan, you have time travel; send the cyber-goo forward
in time to the end of the universe to be swallowed up by all the nothingness
there. Not backwards in time, when they’ll be loads of poets milling about.
So the series ends on a cliff-hanger with Jodie Whittkar
doing an impression of David Tennant in a jail cell, ending her second season
still not having established a personality for her Doctor.
