An Hour of Who a Day: September 2023

September 23, 2023: "The Power of the Doctor"

While trying to stop a hijacking by CyberMasters, the Doctor, Yaz, and Dan become involved in an elaborate plot of the Master's involving multiple time zones, old friends, old enemies, and a very large source of energy. The Master is ready to take over not just the Earth, but the Doctor herself...

And so here we are at the end of not only Jodie Whittaker's time as the Doctor, but also Chris Chibnall's time as showrunner. And if that weren't enough, this is also ostensibly marking the BBC's Centenary (although, other than airing five days after the actual date and providing some cameos from earlier Doctors and companions, this has essentially nothing to do with those celebrations -- there are no plot points involving the BBC or 1922, for instance). It's also the longest episode of the 21st-century run to date (and only a couple minutes shorter than record-holder The Five Doctors). So there's a lot going on. Do they pull it off? Well...

It's been a trend for the stories made in this block of episodes (beginning with Flux, if you've forgotten) to be overstuffed and overcomplicated more often than not, and "The Power of the Doctor" continues that trend. We jump from location to location, across multiple planets and time zones, with a huge number of plot threads to try to keep track of. In other circumstances that might be OK, but there's just so much going on, and not enough explanations to clearly link it all together, that what we get is a frequently muddled mess.

One of the major examples of this is the Master. I'm delighted to see Sacha Dhawan back as the Master, and it feels appropriate for the thirteenth Doctor to bow out while opposing the Master, but because Chibnall seems interested in including as many ideas as he can, the end result is a scheme that seems overly complicated even by the Master's standards. Near as I can gather (and I've had to watch this multiple times to even figure this much out), the Master wants to take over the Doctor's body, so he enlists the help of his CyberMasters (who are back with no explanation after seemingly being all destroyed at the end of "The Timeless Children" -- guess Ko Sharmus died for nothing?) to create a giant power plant planet in order to induce a forced regeneration. Then he also gets the Daleks involved 106 years later so that they can capture the Doctor for him, in exchange for which they get to exterminate humanity via volcanoes. All this so he can, er, cosplay as a Doctor mashup.

The Master in the Doctor's body surveys the chaos he's caused.
("The Power of the Doctor") ©BBC

This is even stranger when you think about it, because "The Timeless Children" established that the Master hated the idea of there being a bit of Doctor in him so much that he was willing to wipe out the Time Lords. Yet here he seems to desperately want to become the Doctor. Now admittedly this is partly to ruin the Doctor's name, but perhaps not entirely: there's a moment later on where the Master seems to not want to be the Master ("Don't let me go back to being me") that suggests something more is going on. But if the alternative to being the Master is being the Doctor, it's a bit surprising that the Master of "The Timeless Children" would be OK with that. (Unless the Master was lying about some of that there; I'm still not convinced the Master isn't also a Timeless Child, so to speak.)

But even setting larger character motivations aside, what is the Master playing at here? He seems to be hanging out as Rasputin in 1916 Russia for fun, and while it makes a certain sense for the Master to be Rasputin, there doesn't seem to be any intrinsic reason for it. Did he just really want to have a dance party to Boney M? And what's going on with all the seismologists? Is the Master concerned they might discover the Daleks? Or is he just trying to drop clues for the Doctor while he gets himself arrested by UNIT? It seems like a lot of effort just to capture the Doctor. (Not to mention involving the Daleks, which you'd think would be just asking for trouble. Well, except for the fact that they seem pretty much incidental here.)

And it feels like Chibnall missed a trick by making Sacha Dhawan play the Master in the Doctor's body, and not having Jodie Whittaker doing it instead. Imagine if it had been Whittaker playing the Master at this point, and Yaz sees the person she loves doing unspeaking acts. It would give Whittaker a chance to flex her acting muscles and make a much larger impact. But as it is, it just looks like the Master dressed up as the Doctor and just claimed the war he started was done by her, as if people wouldn't just think, "Well that's just the Master".

Now, the Master's entire plan is probably the most obvious issue, but there are others. It's probably because there are too many characters involved, but the way Dan Lewis leaves is really odd. He doesn't even make it to the 13-minute mark before he decides he's had enough scrapes with death, thank you, he'd like to go home now. It makes sense from a character point-of-view, but dramatically it's awkward, like trying to tidy up a loose end before getting to the heart of the story. So farewell to John Bishop, who was one of the best things about series 13. Frankly, Dan deserved better.

But similarly, because this is the end of the thirteenth Doctor's era, it does seem like Chibnall is trying to stuff as much stuff in as he can, with varying degrees of success. It's great seeing Kate Stewart and UNIT back, but in some ways it just feels like an excuse for the Master to do more Bond villainy, this time à la Skyfall, with being captured and brought inside headquarters part of his elaborate plan. Then there's the return of Ashad (or rather, his clone, according to a quick line from the Master), even though he doesn't get anything specific to do. Vinder is here because... he was present before, I guess, even though it doesn't make sense why he's there in 1916 in the first place. (Something to do with the wormhole they mention offhand, I'm guessing, but it's not explicit.) At least the cameo from the (holographic) Fugitive Doctor makes sense.

Kate, Ace, Tegan, Yaz, and the Doctor inside UNIT HQ. ("The Power of
the Doctor") ©BBC

It's not all bad, fortunately. One of the best things about "The Power of the Doctor" is the way it brings back both Tegan and Ace, and it's interesting to see how they've grown and changed since we last saw them. Tegan seems rather aggrieved that the Doctor hasn't come back to see her since 1984, and while she seems to have done her best to live a life helping people it hasn't all gone smoothly. "I have spent the past thirty years living like a nomad," she tells Kate Stewart. "I have done land mines, coups, I have been hijacked, and I've nearly drowned trying to help people. I've seen off two husbands, and somewhere out there is an adopted son who hasn't called me for six weeks." Ace seems more calm and collected and with less of a chip on her shoulder than Tegan has, even while we get a sense that she and the Doctor parted on less than ideal terms. "Didn't the Doctor ditch you?" the Master taunts her. "No? Little fallout with your Machiavellian maestro?" But despite that, Ace seems more at peace with things and is still the Ace we remember. And it's lovely how she immediately accepts this new Doctor, calling her "Professor". But for both Ace and Tegan, it's cool to see them still risking their lives and being heroic, while still recognizably the same characters as before.

There's also something glorious about the little cameos of old Doctors, as the current Doctor stands on the brink of regeneration. It starts with David Bradley once more portraying the first Doctor before moving to Colin Baker, then Peter Davison, then Paul McGann (Paul McGann!), and finally Sylvester McCoy. (Therefore meaning every surviving Doctor has now appeared in the 21st-century version.) Each Doctor gets a little bit of screentime and some fun character moments, such as Paul McGann refusing to appear in the same robes that the others are wearing. "I don't do robes," he says. "...I am a manifestation of our consciousness. I can wear what I like." It's also genuinely lovely to see Peter Davison interact with Tegan again, and Sylvester McCoy with Ace. The scene with Tegan provides her some closure, which is sweet. "You think you left and I never thought of you again," the holographic Doctor tells her. "I never forget any of you. I remember everything." "Yeah?" Tegan challenges him. "Well, what am I thinking, seeing all these Cybermen?" "Adric," he replies, after a pause. It's a quick scene, but it's a really good one. Similarly, the scene between Ace and the holo-Doctor is also handled well, filling in a little bit of detail about what happened after Survival. "I was only ever trying to teach you good habits, Ace," the seventh Doctor says. "Obviously, I failed." "You never failed me, Professor," Ace replies. "You made me the person I am today. I'm sorry we fell out. I'm sorry I judged you. I didn't understand the burden you carried." It's nice to see Sophie Aldred and Sylvester McCoy back together again, even for a brief moment.

The companion cameos are great too. The first one is perhaps the best just because it's so unexpected: Ace running into Graham while exploring a volcano, as Graham continues to investigate strange things and help out, like he and Ryan were going to at the end of "Revolution of the Daleks". Bradley Walsh has lost none of his charm: "I can't get the hang of this," he says to Ace after unsuccessfully trying to use psychic paper on her. The two of them have great chemistry and so it's fun to watch their interplay. And then the fact that Graham organizes a companion support group at the end so that they can talk to each other about their experiences with the Doctor leads to some fun cameos from Katy Manning as Jo Jones, Bonnie Langford as Mel (guess Sabalom Glitz took her back home at some point), and William Russell as Ian, back on the show after over 57 years (which, incidentally, set a Guinness World Record for longest gap between appearances of a character on TV). "Sorry, did you say 'her'?" he asks. It's a great moment, bringing back these nods to the past, without overdoing it or making it incomprehensible for casual viewers.

But to be honest, while these moments are welcome, there just aren't enough of them. And they're not all perfect; the major glaring flaw in this regard is the way this story seems to more or less ignore the burgeoning relationship between Yaz and the Doctor. This is the one story where you can really start to see what the Doctor sees in Yaz, as she acts to bring the Doctor back from her forced regeneration and handles flying the TARDIS, making a fine showing of herself. So the fact that this story treats them as mates at best is a bit frustrating, especially after the end of "Legend of the Sea Devils". It's a bit disappointing how Chibnall brought the characters to the edge of a resolution in the previous story and then backed away from it here.

So in many ways, "The Power of the Doctor" encapsulates the best and worst moments of the Chibnall era. He excels at characterization and character interplay but falls down a bit when it comes to plotting and Epicness. If Steven Moffat tended to plot things so tightly they would nearly break, Chibnall is the opposite, more interested in throwing a bunch of ideas together without exploring the ramifications of any of it. This means that when he tries to go big, the result can be messy. There's so much in "The Power of the Doctor" that seems to be there because Chibnall thinks it would be fun or cool without trying to determine how or why these things are present, and so the final result suffers. And when you have a show that's spent the majority of its 59 years training people to think about what they're seeing and why things work the ways they do, this uneven mishmash can be disappointing. In general it's nice to look at (well, mostly -- there are, oddly, a couple continuity issues and things that don't work the way I'm guessing director Jamie Magnus Stone wanted them to, such as the first look at Rasputin that accidentally reveals it's the Master, or a shot of the battered Dalek that isn't at all battered). The characters are fun to watch, and seeing them move through this story is genuinely enjoyable. It's just the story itself where things fall down. And unfortunately, the plot is such a big part of this episode that the final result is a disappointment for all but perhaps the least demanding viewers.

But yes, time's up for the thirteenth Doctor. After sending Yaz away for some reason ("I think I need to do this next bit alone"), she goes to watch one final sunrise and gets a little farewell speech that's mercifully less overwritten than what Peter Capaldi got. "That's the only sad thing," she says. "I want to know what happens next. Right, then. Doctor whoever-I'm-about-to-be: tag, you're it." And then we get a rather stylish regeneration as the camera pulls back (and this time they're not destroying a TARDIS interior!), before, surprisingly, David Tennant reappears -- and not Ncuti Gatwa, who had been announced as the next Doctor. "I know these teeth," he says (in a line that was apparently written by Tennant himself). And yes, the Doctor's outfit regenerates as well: ostensibly because incoming showrunner Russell T Davies (back again!) didn't want to provide fuel for bigots with David Tennant wearing women's clothing (not that this was an issue earlier in the episode when Sacha Dhawan did it...), but part of me wonders if it's also because it had happened way back in 1966, with Hartnell into Troughton.

And so that's the end of Jodie Whittaker's time as the Doctor. It's interesting; while she's a trailblazing Doctor just by virtue of the fact of being the first woman Doctor, she doesn't seem like that big a departure from the other Doctors. It's proof, if nothing else, that anyone really can play the Doctor. The thirteenth Doctor was characterized by a joy for life and adventure, and Whittaker brought a real energy and liveliness to the part that made that joy shine through. As a Doctor, Whittaker more than easily proved her worth. If there's any caveat to be had, it's perhaps similar to that for Colin Baker, where the stories didn't always give her the best material to work with. Jodie Whittaker is at her best whizzing around, fixing things and discovering new worlds. If only she'd had more opportunities for that and less for exposition to be directed at her that she had to stand there and react to.

But this is also the end of Chris Chibnall's tenure as showrunner, and, as I noted above, it was a tenure marked by ups and downs. Chibnall's biggest strengths are characterization and small-scale stories, and it's in these moments that his time shines. Series 11 in particular is marked by a number of these stories, and so it may be the strongest of his three series. It's only when he tries to mimic, either consciously or unconsciously, the larger-scale stakes of his two immediate predecessors that things start to go wrong. Sometimes it seems like this is just because he hasn't taken the time to properly emphasize important details, such that they get lost in a sea of noise. But in any event, it does mean that there are moments during his time that fall flat. In many ways, then, his real successes were behind the camera, with conscious efforts to diversify the cast and crew of the show. All that said, for right now I'm generally positive about the thirteenth Doctor's era, because there are more hits than misses. There are so many positive things about Chibnall's time on the show, from casting to location filming to some really exceptional stories, but I think the additions to the Mythos of the show overshadow all the things that Chibnall unequivocally did right. But, more than Davies or Moffat, Chibnall's time as showrunner might be the hardest to judge right now. He took some big narrative swings that, right now, don't seem like they've really paid off. But it will be interesting to see how those moves are treated in the next 5, 10, or 20 years. Will they become part of the bedrock of the show, or will they be quietly ignored? And how will fandom treat this era now that it's over? It will be curious to see.

But now, as always, it's time to look forward, to the new fourteenth Doctor, who somehow has the same face as the tenth Doctor. How could that be? We'll have to wait for the 60th anniversary specials to find out...