Doctor Who: Empire of Death

And so we come to the end of the first series of DOCTOR WHO produced in conjunction with Disney+. It’s been a bit of a mixed bag, this season, I feel, as you’ve no doubt gleaned from my reactions over these last seven weeks. And this finale doesn’t really fix all of that. Like most of showrunner Russell T. Davies’ previous big finale stories, it’s rife with plot that goes nowhere, scenes and moments that are about spectacle but which are ultimately superfluous, answers being deliberately undercut, and dodgy story logic. But as Russell’s work almost always does, it succeeds in the emotional moments, it provides some degree of closure even if some of the questions will linger on into next season, and it does feel somewhat satisfying. And, for pretty much the first time since Space Babies, the Doctor actually does stuff, he’s the protagonist in the classic sense. So that alone was enough to bump up its score in my eyes.

Let me flip to the end to begin with, which seems appropriate. I thought that the final 5 minutes or so were great. Once all of the running around and danger was over, the stuff that landed the best for me was the emotional resolutions. While it doesn’t really make sense with what we’ve been seen and shown throughout the earlier episodes, I loved the fact that Ruby’s long-sought mother was just a regular person, and not a god or a Deus ex machina at all. And I thought the goodbye sequence between the Doctor and Ruby was terrific, some of the best interplay that these characters got. And yes, I know that Ruby will be back next season, but my guess is that that’ll be more like a Martha Jones situation, where she’ll guest star for a few episodes but she’ll no longer be the main, driving companion. Anyway, I loved all of this, and it meant that I left the episode in a good frame of mind.

Also, as opposed to some, the instant that Sutekh dusted the UNIT HQ cast, I knew that this was all going to get undone AVENGERS: ENDGAME-style. And so I didn’t worry about it. Those stakes, I knew, were false, manipulative, just a way of raising the bar for what the Doctor had to then go and do. I feel as though there was some bad editing going into the scene in the tent, where the Doctor is suddenly on some random planet and has found the one random woman who is still alive there somehow–and who has a spoon that he can use to…do something with the memory TARDIS to make it more “real”. Which is a crazy sentence, one that encapsulates everything that’s both good and bad about this era. That scene in the tent was largely intended to be a red herring–we’re clearly meant to look at the woman who has lost a daughter and to think that she might be the mysterious mother of Ruby who will somehow hold the key to victory. But that’s all misdirect, and so that oddly long scene doesn’t have a whole lot of significance after you arrive at the end of the episode. If you cut it out and edited around it, would you miss it? It’s nicely acted, but it’s completely extraneous.

The Memory TARDIS was as well a bit of an absurd contrivance, but that one had at least been set up in all of those TALES OF THE TARDIS specials that were released the past few months, so it was more plausible than it might otherwise have been. You go along with it because it’s working for the characters, even if the reason it can do the things that it can seemingly do are a bit scatterbrained. I also thought that the idea that 2046 still somehow existed as a memory so that the Doctor could go there and get the thing that he needed to defeat Sutekh was completely implausible. Past a certain point, though, you just need to roll with these things.

Sutekh himself, one of the great DOCTOR WHO monsters of the past, was a bit ill-served by his CGI incarnation here. I thought this might be the case last episode, and it was: it was virtually impossible to have Sutekh interact with any of the real live performers. So he was reduced to little more than a large barking dog, with the action needing to be carried out by his Angel of Death minions. Back in Pyramids of Mars, Sutekh was genuinely scary, even though he couldn’t move. Here, not quite the same. Which is the problem with putting the Doctor up against an all-powerful deity: a fair fight is no fight, and so the only way the Doctor can come out on top is if there’s some limitation for the foe, like not actually being able to interact with him.

I did like that the solution was a legitimate physical solution (though I don’t know that the story algebra of “If you kill death, then the result is that everything comes back to life” really holds water) and even that the Doctor had to behave against his Code in order to stop Sutekh permanently. That was another sequence that felt as though it went on a bit too long and might have been tightened up. But the Doctor was active as a character, planning and executing a trap with the elements we’ve already been shown that he has at hand, and so that at least delighted me.

I also got a great big laugh out of how swiftly Russell discarded all of his red herrings from the previous episode. Susan? Never there, only seen here in one ancient clip, a trap for the Doctor. Mrs Flood? Nothing to do with this, and reduced to dust regardless of what plans she had. Even the enormous UNIT guest cast is swept away virtually instantly, with only Kate Stewart getting any genuine screen time, and then only a dollop. We didn’t need any of them any longer, and so away they go with a Thanos-snap. I will say that I was a bit sad not to get some sort of cameo or appearance from the real Carole Ann Ford. Especially given William Russell’s passing a week or two ago, she’s the last remaining survivor of the original cast, and she isn’t getting any younger. After teasing her for the season, it would have been nice to see her–who knows if we’ll ever get another chance.

So that’s it. A bit of a flawed season with some nice individual moments and performances, but without a whole lot in the way of episodes that I’m likely to want to rewatch in the future. If nothing else, it was a lot more fun and engaging than the Chibnall era had been, so that feels like at least a step in teh right direction, even if the show isn’t quite on the same footing that it once had been. But it gives hope for the future. As does the fact that Steven Moffat is writing the Christmas Special in a few months. His scripts continue to be the tightest, and when he’s got Russell as his backstop and to oversee the actual production, he’s about as capable as anybody has been in the new WHO era.