The Vanquishers: Too Many Plates, Not Enough Hands
The Vanquishers has to resolve every thread Flux started and does it in under an hour. Three Doctors, four villains, and almost no room to land any of it.
The Vanquishers has to resolve every thread Flux started and does it in under an hour. Three Doctors, four villains, and almost no room to land any of it.
The Master explains the Timeless Child and rewrites the Doctor’s entire origin, in a finale that spends forty minutes on a retcon and forgets to be a story.
The Cyber-Wars are over and humanity has lost, in a bleak, well-mounted penultimate episode carrying a subplot that makes no sense until it ruins everything.
A ghost story at Lake Geneva in 1816 turns into the arrival of a half-converted Cyberman, in the best-directed and best-monstered hour of the era.
The Doctor spends nine hundred years defending a town called Christmas, runs out of regenerations, and Matt Smith gets one of the great goodbyes.
Neil Gaiman rebuilds the Cybermen as something genuinely frightening, gives Matt Smith a chess game against himself, and buries both under a derelict theme park.
The Doctor spends his last free days babysitting with Craig Owens, in a warm, funny episode with a farewell running under every scene and a lazy resolution.
The Next Doctor drops the Doctor into 1851 London to meet a man claiming to be him, in a Christmas special about grief, identity and a very large Cyberman.
Doomsday sets Daleks against Cybermen over London, then ends on a cold Norwegian beach. My take on the Doctor Who finale and that goodbye.
Army of Ghosts turns a planet’s grief into a Cyberman invasion, opens up Torchwood Tower, and ends on a Dalek cliffhanger I never saw coming.
The Age of Steel reveals the Cybermen’s true horror and gives Mickey Smith his hero moment in an emotionally sharp Doctor Who finale.
Rise of the Cybermen strands the Doctor on a parallel Earth where Rose’s dad is alive and John Lumic is building an army of steel men from the living.