I know I already did the Sunday Who Review on, well, Sunday, but I'm tossing in an extra one this week. Based on the number of days I can reasonably expect to have time to watch movies between now and the Oscars, I have a good ballpark on how many I'll get to. However, my time is back-weighted more toward next month, so I'm going to drop in an early Sunday Who Review or Book of Rannells post here and there to free up more space for movie reviews closer to Oscar time (the pandemic has me leaning into my neurotic organizational tendencies, so just accept that this is how I need to work this.) So, without further ado, have an early Sunday Who Review!
Even though Six remains my least favorite Doctor, I’ve watched his seasons a few times now, and I’ve found things that I like about him. As such, I feel equipped to give him a genuine Big Damn Hero Moments that appreciates some choice victories of his (spoilers.)
Discovering Mester’s Plan (Series 21, Episode 26 – “The Twin Dilemma: Episode 4”)
Two separate revelations here lead the Doctor to a disturbing truth. First, he realizes that Mester’s plan to bring two other planets into the same orbit as Jaconda, albeit at different points in the timestream, would result in both planets being pulled into the sun. This doesn’t make sense to him until he sees the Gastropod hatchery, where he discovers that the outer shells of the egg have been engineered to be tough enough to withstand an exploding sun. Because cleverness is about both learning things and making important inferences therein, he puts together Mester’s plan: use the force of the sun explosion to scatter the eggs throughout the galaxy, where the Gastropods can hatch and colonize every planet they land on.
Sabotaging the Rani’s TARDIS (Series 22, Episode 6 – “The Mark of the Rani: Episode 2”)
When the Rani and the Master escape from Peri, the Doctor isn’t worried. Earlier in the episode, he tinkered with the acceleration in the Rani’s TARDIS, which prevents her from simply hopping to the other side of the village to evade the Doctor and then continuing her cruel experiments on the humans. Instead, as soon as her TARDIS takes off, speed builds rapidly and she and the Master are slingshotted to the other end of the galaxy. Bonus points for the resulting time spillage causing one of her baby dinosaur specimens to start aging at an incredible speed!
Sabotaging the Time Module (Series 22, Episode 9 – “The Two Doctors: Episode 3”)
Clever Doctor! Chessene and the Sontarans have stolen an experimental time module, but in order to use it, it needs to be primed with Time Lord DNA (otherwise, it wouldn’t be able to withstand the time vortex.) With Jamie held at gunpoint, the Doctor does as he’s asked, but he leaves an extra little surprise for the baddies. Unbeknownst to them, he sabotages the module, rigging it so it’ll only work once – when Chessene inevitably insists on using Peri to test it – and then explode on the second try.
Escaping Drathro (Series 23, Episode 2 – “The Trial of a Time Lord: Episode 2”)
Why look, here’s another time-honored “forced by the baddie to do their dirty work because you’re such a genius” moment. Drathro orders the Doctor to help its two assistants fix power fluctuations in the underground system. The Doctor sticks around just long enough to gain a little useful information, then slyly lays a trap for Drathro and the assistants. Keeping up a lively patter, he enlists all them of them to “help” him restore the system, when really, they’re creating a circuit that completes when he flips a switch, electrifying them so he can slip away.
Discovering Hallett (Series 23, Episode 10 – “The Trial of a Time Lord: Episode 10”)
This particular move doesn’t accomplish much in the moment (although it does lead the Doctor to an important piece of information he’ll need for the main mystery of the story,) but I’m a sucker for Sherlock Holmes-style flexing, making deductions off of seemingly-minor observations. When one of the non-oxygen-breathing Mogarians starts to have a medical crisis, the Doctor is urged not to remove the Mogarian’s face plate, which protects him from the oxygen, but the Doctor knows better: this isn’t a Mogarian at all. Sure enough, he pries off the face plate and reveals a human inside the suit. How did he know this? In the ongoing framing device of the Doctor’s trial, he not-so-humbly rewinds the tape the highlight the important clue, that this “Mogarian” could be understood by everyone on board despite having his translator switched off.
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