Following World Enough and Time was always going to be difficult, and “The Doctor Falls” doesn’t quite manage it, because it’s a longer, looser, more conventional episode with a lot of business to finish. But it contains the best speech this incarnation ever gets, the most interesting thing the show has done with the Master in fifty years, and a last stand that genuinely deserves the word. If Capaldi’s Doctor is remembered for one scene, it will be from this episode.
A farm, two miles up
The setting is a good one: floor 507, a vast agricultural deck with a holographic sky, farmed by a few hundred people who have no idea what ship they’re on or what’s happening below them. They know something, though. They know that things come up from underneath and take children, and their defence is to put captured Cybermen on poles in the fields as scarecrows. That’s a genuinely eerie image and it does a lot of quiet work, because these people have been living with the horror long enough to have developed folk practices around it. The escalation is smart too. Because time runs differently on every deck, the Cybermen are evolving independently at different rates on different floors, so the crude cloth-faced Mondasians from the hospital are being followed up the ship by later, sleeker models. The whole design history of the species, arriving in sequence, as a siege.
The saddest thread is Bill’s, and the show handles it with real restraint. She’s a Cyberman, and she doesn’t experience herself as one. She walks and talks as herself, and the audience mostly sees her as Pearl Mackie, until the episode cuts to a mirror, or to someone else’s point of view, and there’s a blank cloth face and a flat electronic voice. That’s an elegant solution to an impossible problem: it lets Mackie act, it keeps the horror present, and it makes the gap between how she feels and what she is into the actual subject. The scene where she asks the Doctor whether she can still cry, and he tells her the truth, is played completely straight and is almost unwatchable. The show also does not pretend this is fixable. There’s no cure, no reversal, no clever trick. The Doctor tries and fails and says so.
The two Masters
The best material in the episode is Michelle Gomez and John Simm circling each other. The idea is genuinely rich: two incarnations of the same person, one of whom has spent years in a vault possibly becoming better, meeting the version of himself who finds that idea contemptible. Simm plays the older self as delighted, cruel and entirely uninterested in reform, while Gomez plays a woman genuinely uncertain what she wants and embarrassed by both possible answers. There is a real sadness running underneath her performance: she knows what the decision is going to cost. And the resolution is perfect. Missy chooses. She decides to go back and stand with the Doctor, not because she’s been persuaded exactly, but because she has worked out that she’d rather, and she stabs her past self in the back on the way so that he’ll regenerate into her and the choice will stick.
Then he shoots her. Walking away, without turning round, laughing, he kills her with a full charge, knowing it will prevent her regenerating, because he refuses to become the person who stood with the Doctor. So the Master dies at the hands of Missy, and Missy dies at the hands of the Master, and neither of them ever tells him. He goes to his grave believing she stayed in the vault. It’s the most satisfying end this character has ever been given, and its cruelty is that the one decent decision she ever made goes entirely unwitnessed. Nardole’s promotion is one of the quieter pleasures here, too. He arrived as a comic irritant in a Christmas special and spent a season being fussy about paperwork, and the finale reveals what he actually is: extremely competent, entirely unsentimental, and the only person present with the organisational skill to keep a few hundred farmers alive. The Doctor doesn’t send him away to protect him, he sends him away because he’s the right man for the job, and says so. Matt Lucas plays the goodbye without a single joke, which after a season of them is the correct choice.
The speech, and the fall
And then the scene. The Master and Missy ask him why he’s staying, when the fight is unwinnable and the people are strangers and nobody will ever know he was there. And Capaldi, exhausted and wounded and standing in a field he has no stake in, tells them. He isn’t doing it to win. He isn’t doing it because it works, or because he expects to survive, or because anyone asked. He does it because it’s right, and because it’s decent, and above all because it’s kind. He tells them he’s not trying to win and not doing it because it would be easier if he did. He’s doing it because it’s what he does, and he’d like them to stand with him. It is the clearest statement of purpose this programme has ever written for its lead, and Capaldi delivers it without a shred of grandstanding, as a tired man explaining something obvious to two people who genuinely cannot follow the argument. Ten years of this era’s Doctors being defined by trauma and reputation and legend, and it turns out the answer was always this simple.
The last act does what the title says. Nardole leads the survivors up to the next floor and stays behind to look after them, which is a good and unshowy exit for a character who turned out to matter far more than he first appeared. The Doctor fights alone, sets off the whole deck, and takes the Cybermen with him. Bill finds him dying, and then Heather arrives, the girl with the star in her eye from the season’s first episode, now something made of water and space, and gives Bill the same offer she once took: leave, be this, go anywhere. Bill’s tear falls on the Doctor and brings him back far enough to be carried to the TARDIS. It’s a soft ending for Bill after the brutality of her conversion, and I understand the complaint, but it’s set up properly across the season, it isn’t a reset since she doesn’t become human again, and after what the previous episode did to her I find I don’t begrudge her a way out. Then the Doctor, alone on the TARDIS floor, begins to regenerate and refuses it. He staggers out into snow, saying he doesn’t want to change. And a voice behind him says that he doesn’t have to, and introduces itself as the Doctor, and it’s David Bradley, playing the first one. It might be the best finale the revived show has done, and on the day I wasn’t inclined to argue.
What it leaves behind is Cybermen on poles, farmers who’ve been living with the horror long enough to build scarecrows out of it. It leaves a companion who can’t see what she’s become, Bill as herself until a mirror, which is elegant and worse than showing the mask throughout. It leaves two Masters and one choice, with Missy deciding to stand with him and her past self murdering her for it, the best ending this character has ever had. It leaves “because it’s kind”, not legend or reputation or trauma but the Twelfth Doctor’s entire philosophy, delivered to two people incapable of understanding it. And it leaves a refusal in the snow, a Doctor who won’t regenerate and a man telling him he doesn’t have to, who happens to be the one who started all this.
Rating: 4.5/5. Sprawling where its predecessor was tight, and it can’t match that episode’s control, but it earns its length with the Master material, gives Nardole a genuinely fine exit, and contains the single best speech of the modern series. Bill’s rescue is the one soft landing, and it’s forgivable. Nobody was watching, nobody would ever know, and he stayed anyway. That was always the whole of it.
