Doctor Who Series 12 Spoilers – “Ascension of the Cybermen” / “The Timeless Children”

Okay, so I’ve worked my way back up to the finale now. As it says in the title, spoilers ahead. I’m going to save the actual Timeless Child stuff for next week, just because it’s an awful lot to unpack and deserves its own post, so today is more about the other parts of the story.

We’ll start with the Cybermen and their whole deal. I like the concept of the Lone Cyberman, along with Jack’s warning about him. I was disappointed that Jack didn’t appear again at the end of the season – I’m hardcore crossing my fingers that he meets Thirteen at some point because he just has to. In execution, though, the Lone Cyberman hasn’t been as interesting to me. As I said in my “Ascension of the Cybermen” review, it bugged me that the Cybermen’s MO with the humans is more kill than capture/convert, and that continues in an even bigger way in “The Timeless Children.” Because of the Lone Cybermen’s half-converted thing, he still has emotions, and that’s turned him into a zealot against humanity. His goal, rather than to propogate the Cybermen through human conversion, is for the Cybermen to “ascend” to pure mechanical beings and wipe out all organic life through the use of his Death Particle.

Much like the Master, I was disappointed in that plan. Obviously, it would be horrendous, and obviously, we want our heroes to avert it. But it just feels so generic. As the Master says, “Anybody can build a robot.” What’s much more interesting about the Cybermen is the fact that they’re made from people. Throughout both episodes, the Doctor and the humans’ biggest fear is of the humans being taken and converted by the Cybermen, that visceral body horror of being turned into the thing they fear, but the Lone Cyberman is like, “Forget that conversion nonsense; I’m just going to kill all of you.” Eh.

I do like the companions holding their own against the Cybermen, though. Graham’s idea to use emptied-out Cyber suits as disguises is especially neat – I like how immediately weird and unnatural it looks when they first start moving in the suits with their ordinary human movements. I also like Ryan taking out a group of Cybermen with that well-thrown bomb. It’s a little thing, but Ryan’s issues with his dyspraxia and coordination have been brought up enough that this moment is believable as a big personal victory for him. When the companions reach the portal to Gallifrey, I love that Yaz is the one to march straight through it without thinking, determined to get back to the Doctor no matter what.

Even if we don’t get Jack in the finale, we do get both the Master and a Matrix/telepathic appearance from the Nth Doctor. The Nth Doctor is a little softer here; she feels more connected to Thirteen and helps her through the massive existential crisis of the Timeless Child reveal. In “Fugitive of the Judoon,” it’s all about the mystery – neither Doctor remembers the other, and the Nth Doctor is a gun-toting fugitive who isn’t acting all that Doctory at first glance. But in this episode, you feel the throughline a little more, even if we still don’t know all the details of that history and what it is. There’s just that slight sense of, “I’m her, and she’s me. This is who I am and always have been.” Meanwhile, the Master continues to be fantastic. Again, I’ll save more of the Timeless Child side of things for next week, but he’s great with the Cybermen too. His scenes with the Lone Cyberman are awesome, and even if the concept of regenerating Cyber Time Lords seems a lot less unstoppable to me than he seems to think, I love that they wear cloaks and have lattice metal versions of the Time Lord high collars.

As for the Doctor? I’m holding onto most of her stuff until next week, but on the Cyberman plot, it’s unfortunately not her best outing. For all that she’s insistent on fixing her mistakes re: the Lone Cyberman at the start of the story, she’s not all that effective, and it’s one of those stories where most of her plans seem to come to nought and/or she’s left scrambling a lot of the time. In stories like these, I always get a little tense. It’s hard for me to think back over some of her predecessors’ old episodes. Do they have stories like that, where they don’t get much of a win at all until the very end? Is Thirteen getting treated differently in some of her stories, or am I just more sensitive to it because I’m aware of how a section of the fandom is against her? And if it is different, is it intentional in any way or just a result of lackluster writing that then reflects badly on her? Those are not the thoughts I want to be having about Doctor Who.

And then there’s the end, the apparent destruction of the Cyber Time Lords (but not the Master? Please tell me he got away, one season isn’t nearly enough for this new Master!) by the Death Particle. Big explosive endings like that can be tricky on Doctor Who, because the Doctor is always advocating to win without violence but the baddies pretty much always end up dying. We’ve seen numerous variations on this scene, where the Doctor has their hand on the trigger and doesn’t go through with pushing it, only for someone else to do it in their stead. I understand the urge to keep up the appearance of the hero’s hands being cleaner (not to mention still being alive – these types of endings usually result in self-sacrifice for the trigger-pusher,) but it rings a little hollow when the destruction still happens anyway. It gets to be something of a cop-out.

So, as a season finale, very far from overwhelmingly positive for me, although to be fair, new Who finales kind of generally have a bad track record in my opinion. They’re the episodes most likely to be big and bombastic and include major game-changing stuff that subsequent episodes won’t deal with in a satisfying way. This finale is far from my least favorite on that front, but even though there’s some definite good stuff here, I wouldn’t really chalk it up as a win.

Onto the Timeless Child next week, mostly wrapping up my thoughts on this season!