An immortal menace returns in the first part of the season finale – that raises some very interesting questions about child labour in the Whoniverse
Finally, we discover the identity of the mysterious woman who has been appearing with the Doctor and Ruby all through this season’s adventures, and it turns out that Susan Triad (Susan Twist) has been a pawn all along. It was also very amusing that a lot of things that had been the subject of frenzied online speculation – was S Triad an all-too obvious anagram of Tardis? – were dealt with in the first couple of minutes, with everybody standing around essentially saying to the viewer “Well … obviously!”
This was very much the act one set-up of a two-part story. Mel (Bonnie Langford) had far more to do than she did when she returned for the 60th anniversary, and having her undercover in the Triad technology company was a good way of illustrating how Unit utilises the Doctor’s former companions once their travels have ended. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) again flashed some of the anger and disgust we saw when she rejected Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) in 73 Yards.
It was a little obvious that the two members of the Unit bridge crew we had not encountered before were going to end up Sutekh-fodder. And the fact that both Rose (Yasmin Finney) and Morris Gibbons (Lenny Rush) were working for Unit does raise some questions about child labour laws in the Whoniverse.
Having a VHS cassette as the vital bit of tech to drive the plot forward was a lovely nod to the series’ own wilderness years, when VHS was the only medium Doctor Who existed on – even if the time window then being able to extrapolate a 3D hologram environment from the tape was quite the technobabble stretch.
There has been some criticism that Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor has leaned too much into his emotional vulnerabilities – the character has ended up crying in nearly every episode – but this was a commanding turn from the moment he arrived at Unit. He might have been all smiles and hugs, but there was no doubt he was instantly in charge.
Sum it up in one sentence?
The Doctor and lots of people we’ve already met this season spend 48 minutes gathering together for a cliffhanger reveal.
Life aboard the Tardis
It was not so much life aboard the Tardis as life around the Tardis, as we discovered that the Doctor’s time ship has been hijacked by the immortal god of death, Sutekh. There have been some grumblings in fandom that although this run of the show has the largest and arguably most spectacular Tardis interior set in the show’s history, Gatwa and Gibson have barely shot a scene in it.
Fear factor
So much was invested in building up to the reveal at the end that this episode lacked any real chills along the way. For younger viewers, though, the sequence with Ruby’s creepily hooded mysterious mother and the subsequent death of Col Chidozie (Tachia Newall) may have offered some frights.
