Doctor Who: "The Doctor Falls" Review

“The Doctor Falls” is Peter Capaldi’s third and final series finale, and Steven Moffat’s sixth and also final, although there’s still Christmas to go. Perhaps appropriately, this episode sums up how I feel about their tenures as a whole. The best of it belongs with Vincent van Gogh’s battle with mental illness, whilst the worst of it belongs with the revelation that Davros actually had eyes all along.

The episode gets off on the wrong foot for me, with another flashforward before going back to where “World Enough and Time” left off. “World” also began with a flashforward that the show hasn’t picked up yet, and then also played silly buggers with its chronology, so this all feels deeply unnecessary. I get the impression that sometimes, Steven Moffat doesn’t really get two-parters. This reminds me of “Silence in the Library” or “The Impossible Astronaut” – Moffat has tried to play with expectations as to a two-part story (I seem to recall him saying somewhere that this is what he was going for with SITL), but has just ended up muddying things and stopping the two parts from feeling like a cohesive whole.

When we get back to where last week left off, the episode’s generally pretty great. This is surely the best realisation of The Master in the new series – the writing and performances are just right, and the final consequences of bringing two Masters together are exactly what they should be. Capaldi and Mackie are as great as you’d expect, but Matt Lucas feels like the unsung hero of the show, with a surprisingly poignant final turn as Nardole.

The other thing going on in the story is the fate of the Cyber-converted Bill. And that’s something I find a little more problematic, or at least I find the execution of it to be problematic. Bill can’t accept what’s happening to her, so she’s convinced herself she’s still human. So far, so good… until the show seems to say that this only works so long as she doesn’t look at her hands, or her shadow, or think about how she was able to blast an energy beam out of her head. Which is a bit daft. The idea of flicking between human Bill as she sees herself and her Cyber-self is quite a good one on paper, but in practise it reminds me too much of Watson seeing and conversing with his dead wife in Sherlock: a feeling the show is trying to have its cake and eat it. When Bill talks about how she doesn’t want to keep on living like this, the impact is diluted because she’s still (from our point of view) perfectly normal. That would’ve been far more powerful if we were able to see her as she actually was at that moment – surely there could’ve been some compromise, such as the Cyberman still having Bill’s voice, or our being able to see Bill inside the Cyber-suit as we did at the end of last week’s episode? And why exactly do we continue to see human Bill in scenes that obviously aren’t from her perspective?

However, Bill’s final fate is excellent. It’s a brave and unusual thing for the show to do, and it’s a beautifully done, lyrical scene. Gorgeous. I've not touched on the whole menace of the Cybermen here, but that feels like a backdrop to the Doctor, his friends and enemies; it's generally well-done, though. (I like that Moffat doesn't feel the need to one-up himself with every single season finale and can go with something a bit lower-key than usual; that was definitely a bugbear from Russell T Davies' season finales.)

That just leaves the Doctor. Whilst his desire to not have to regenerate again is a bit left-field, and puts me uncomfortably in mind of the Tenth’s ego-trip, Capaldi’s final scene in this episode is a beautiful moment, and sets things up nicely for Christmas. I’m unsure what casual viewers would have made of the final moment (how many of them would be aware that David Bradley had previously played Hartnell in An Adventure in Space and Time?), but I’m certainly looking forward to seeing how things play out.

And that brings Series 10 to a close. That bloody interminable trilogy with the Monks aside, I think it’s been a fairly consistent run all told; “World Enough and Time” is the obvious stand-out, but the Monks were definitely the only real low point. Each episode has, however, definitely had some drawbacks. And unfortunately, “The Doctor Falls” isn’t alone in having flaws that feel like they were totally avoidable, as they were mostly about narrative tricks that don’t really work. I like this story; I generally like this series, and I think it’s probably Capaldi’s best. But a lot of the time it’s felt like it’s just one step away from being great.