And while the ending played out respectfully, might we have asked for Reece Shearsmith to double up for Patrick Troughton just as Bradley did for Hartnell in Adventure in Space and Time? “Oh, brilliant.” I was only a little bit sadder that the recast Ben and Polly (Jared Garfield and Lily Travers replacing the late Michael Craze and the alive Anneke Wills) were not given a little more to do. Does it seem a /little/ odd that the episode barely recognises that at all? Possibly, but it hardly matters when there’s 54 years of continuity to navigate. Sadly, The Tenth Planet was left as a weak ending, due to Hartnell’s failing health removing him entirely from episode three and his participation in number four being spare. The whole adventure, of course, takes place between the final moments of Hartnell’s final story, The Tenth Planet, which marked the introduction of the Cybermen, the original ‘Mondasian’ version of which were reintroduced - at Capaldi’s request - in the previous story.
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It’s hardly a surprise that Moffat knows his Who-lore, but it’s still rather delightful that so many retro-references are thrown in - the Tardis windows being wrong shape, the First’s insistence on calling it ‘the ship’. To give him a reason to meet himself (gender pronouns are about to become a nightmare from hereon in). And so it is, perhaps the only reason to do a multi-Doctor story. Indeed, the only opponent surely capable of preventing such a grave mistake is ….himself. That blasted universe keeps need saving - a man could get exhausted. In some sense, the villain of the piece is the Doctor himself, resisting survival, and the consequences of what his carrying on means for everyone else. Even the Dalek (Rusty from 2014’s Into the Dalek) has been turned against his own murderous kind and become a strange sort of ally.
Unusually for this series, there’s no actually ‘baddie’ as such. Although, it must be said, all that time playing Queen Victoria has poshened up her Blackpool accent - and it showed. I know she was divisive, with many thinking Clara too big for her boots, but personally I loved the partnership. (Mackie’s next project sees her join Zoe Wanamaker and Steven Mangan in a West End revival of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party.) Glorious, too, see the return of Jenna Coleman as Clara, Bill’s final gift being the return of his memories of her.
But there’s little danger of her future being less bright than the rest of her Nu-Who alumni. It was simply an accident of scheduling that this character had to be a one-season wonder. Doctor Who Photograph: Simon Ridgway/BBC/BBC Worldwide