Neil Patrick Harris is having the time of his life, and for about forty minutes so was I. “The Giggle” hands the show its best villain in years and gives him a toyshop, a string of accents, a music-hall dance number and a genuine sense of menace. Then it spends its last stretch on a regeneration that isn’t one. Three-quarters of it is terrific, and the ending quietly rewrites what this show has always been willing to do to its lead. It’s a frustrating hour for exactly that reason.
The premise is a good one. Every screen since the first television in 1925 has carried a signal that makes everyone certain they’re right about everything, and the world has torn itself apart as a result. It’s a nasty, funny idea, and the opening of ordinary people turning on each other in the street is properly uncomfortable. The 1925 prologue is a creepy start as well, with John Logie Baird demonstrating his invention in a cold London room while a puppet stares into the lens. It gives the special a real edge of horror before the plot has even started.
The Toymaker is superb
Harris plays the Toymaker as a performer who’s never once been bored, and the constant costume and accent changes turn a fairly thin classic villain into something properly unstable. He isn’t threatening because he’s powerful. He’s threatening because he finds all of it delightful and genuinely doesn’t care how it ends. The toyshop sequence is the standout, a long run through a shifting workshop while he narrates the fates of people the Doctor failed, and the show has the nerve to let it play at length. The moment he brings up the Flux and the billions who died in it is the first time any story has made the Doctor answer for that.
And the dance number works. It shouldn’t, but Harris commits to it completely, and the episode has already established him as someone who would absolutely stop a global catastrophe to do a musical bit. The final game is the right shape too, because it isn’t a puzzle the Doctor can out-think, just a game of catch. Deciding the fate of everything with a children’s game is entirely in character for him. It also turns the whole special into the show negotiating with its own history, and the Toymaker suits that because he’s the one villain who treats everything as a game already. This is the most fun a Doctor Who villain has been since Missy.
UNIT and a genuinely good middle act
Kate Stewart finally gets real material, which is long overdue. Jemma Redgrave has spent a decade being handed a briefing and a corridor, and the stretch where the signal takes hold of her and she turns on the Doctor with complete conviction is the best thing she’s had to play. Mel turning up is a lovely bit of continuity handled lightly, and Bonnie Langford is used better here than she ever was in the eighties. She’s a competent adult with a job instead of a screaming companion, and the brief exchange where she and the Doctor acknowledge how long it’s been, without a speech, is the kind of low-key continuity the show should do more often. Shirley remains a good addition, and the middle act never stops moving.
The bi-generation is a cop-out
Then the Doctor is shot, regenerates, and doesn’t die. Instead he splits, with Tennant staying whole and alive while Ncuti Gatwa steps out of him as a second, separate Doctor. The Fifteenth goes off to have adventures, and the Fourteenth stays behind with the Nobles, gets a garden and a family and retires happily. My problem isn’t the new Doctor, it’s what’s been done to the old one. Regeneration has always been the show’s contract with itself: the Doctor loses, dies, and somebody else has to carry it on.
That cost is why the goodbyes land, and Twice Upon a Time is as affecting as it is because the man saying goodbye knew he was finished. Handing a Doctor a house, a family and a peaceful retirement doesn’t reward the character so much as take the stakes out of the mechanism. If one Doctor gets to opt out, every future regeneration has an escape hatch sitting behind it. I can see the argument for it, since Tennant’s Doctor died saying he didn’t want to go and there’s something to finally letting him stop. The show already told that story properly the first time, though, and telling it again with a happier outcome softens it instead of deepening it.
None of which is a complaint about Gatwa, who’s excellent from his first line. He gets about ten minutes and uses them properly: playful, physically expressive, and completely at ease sharing a scene with a predecessor, which isn’t an easy trick. The moment he tells Tennant to go and be well is generous instead of deferential. Wild Blue Yonder is the special I’d rewatch and this is the one that changes things, and I’d rather those had been the other way round. On the casting, at least, there’s nothing to worry about.
Rating: 3.5/5. Really enjoyed most of this. Neil Patrick Harris is magnificent, the signal premise is nasty and clever, Kate finally gets something to do and Gatwa’s arrival is genuinely exciting. It loses real ground for an ending that spares its lead the one cost this show has always insisted on. That’s going to be hard to walk back.