00:30- No matter what. This title sequence will always be fooking EPIC
01:00- The Doctor asks how the Master linked Gallifrey to the Boundary. He doesnt explain. No biggie but you know might have been nice to explain it.
02:00- So the dramatically inept cliffhanger from last week is solved by basically both groups effectively leaving the room. SUDDEN AIRVENT. Do Cybermen need airvents? The Cybermen also appear to just be firing as soon as they enter the door. I suppose the lasers might entertain any cats watching. Some practically nameless character dies when the Cybermen reach shot accuracy of 0.00000001%. I mean the least they could have done is frame this in a way that has her buying time for the rest or something but nope.
"The ship is ours!" Mate you've killed one person and just stopped looking for the others.
02:30- Borusa!
04:30- Graham has a plan. They are going to wear Cybersuits. Its silly. I know way back when Ian hid in a Dalek but the idea that this will work is fancyful. But I'm not sure how they are being tracked so ah well. Just got to remove the remains.
I'm sure they will all fit and the suits can work just fine.
05:30- I actually really like the be a pacifist tomorrow survive today line. It's a shame its sort of lost in all the noise of this ep.
06:30- Assassinated Presidents! Whoop nice ref!
07:00- So did the Master know the Cybermen were coming? "Don't mean to conversion-shame you" ERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR....... Ok. Is it me or is this line REALLY dodgy. Is this like a trans joke? My instinct at the time was it was iffy and its not changed.
09:00- LoneCyber says to set course for Gallifrey. I assume he means the Boundary as thats how they will get there.
10:00- We see the humans fixing up a suit to wear. Well sorry to burst your bubble but I think they've long since stopped looking for you. So its a bit of a wasted effort. This is a nice scene between Graham and Yaz. Its a shame its another they have to sit down and have these in isolation because the general writing has been so poor. It still almost feels like this is the first time THEY HAVE ACTUALLY SPOKEN TO EACH OTHER.
12:00- The Cybermen detect something is wrong with some of the stored Warriors and deduce this is where the humans are. Well thats what might happen if you let them run about and not look for them. Also it shows that they cant actually detect the humans so really the suits are pointless and they should just get on the transmat.
13:00- The Matrix. It basically contains everything of the Time Lords. I mention this because of what happens later. It's a massive database.
15:00- Aint no way there is this much room in a Cybersuit. Rather then finish investigating LoneCyber decides he needs to oversee.... errr.... that the ship is going to carry on travelling? I mean what could go wrong with again just letting some of these humans walk about. Did he even bother to check there was something wrong with the suits? Or send a unit to keep looking?
17:00- Ok. Here we go. The beginning of the wikipage plot. Tecteun. Ok so the first space faring tech they make can travel galaxies? Not just to a moon or nearby plant but galaxies! And you find sentient, all be it mute, life? I hope she hit a homerun too!
Tecteun takes the child. A mute child. Apparently this is saving the little girl. Saving her from what I'm not sure as she knows nothing about this lifeform she just found. Does she live here? Are the structures keeping her alive? Are you interested in this location at all? Nah just take the girl.
19:00- Little girl regenerates. OMG.
20:00- The battle begins. Ryan blows them up using his epic Basketball skills. Hilariously calling back the intro to the season. There is no way he throws that bomb that far like that. A quick word about the updated Cybermen design. I quite like them. But the spikes ruin it for me. They just look so stupid. Classic case of over designed. A shame.
22:00- Its weird for me seeing this idea that the Cybermen and Time Lords were rivals and enemies. Tbh its never really seemed like it.
Now we get the Cybermen deciding they basically dont want to be Cybermen. Its again very odd. However rather then doing the interesting thing, removing the robotic part they are going to be pure robots. Which they basically are already. This is all seems really pointless and is just here to up the stakes and give us the DEATH PARTICLE. Which also sadly undermines what little interest I already had in the LoneCyber. He has just got his hands on a massive army of shiny new warriors and...... now he is basically suicide bomber? All this time and the point of him is to hand off the macguffin? Just wat. Also for confirmation once the particle is activated its "capable of destroying all organic life" Thats the line. No scale. Just all organic life. Why not just do it now if all the warriors are pure robots already? This is a Dalek MO stuffed onto the Cybermen and doesn't work.
26:00- We see the child regenerating multiple times. Either this is the most unlucky child ever or..... oh no. Is she being killed over and over? Is this a child abuse theme? I don't know but thats all I can think of and Tecteun is complicit in it. This is really dark gooseberry fool. We never see Tecteun actually looking after the girl. Playing. Teaching. Nothing like that. The girl has no voice. No say. apparently Tecteun isn't interested in the structure she is found by or the weird space/time event in the sky. None of this might explain who she is. She doesn't seem interested in WHO she is but WHAT she is. And the abuse angle is only strengthened because the only way she knows the child will regenerate is by severe trauma or death.
27:30- Love this shot of the Citadel being built. I'm slightly amused they discovered immortality and then time travel then decided to call themselves Time Lords. Not Immortal Lords before that. Although it seems like Tecteun might still be the only one that can regenerate till he decides he needs to create space Tories. He decides to impose a limit on the number of regens. Bet he didn't do this to himself. Wanker. (Whats the betting that the Doc will one day meet up with Tecteun?) Still its nice to know a bit more about the lore around regen. Even if it maybe cocks up how Mels/River gets to regenerate. Its a shame its all stuff in this wikipage lecture. How much more interesting would this be if it turned out the Doctor discovered this and had the dilemma of interfering in the history of her own race? That would be an actual story. Not just data and info. Its actually not all that shocking so far. Regen is a kind of biotech. They create a class system with it, those that can and those that cant. This could be why Susan has never regenerated. She never got the magic graduation jab. The Time Lords only give it to the brightest perhaps? Again none of this is a total shock. Invasion of Time has primitive tribes in the wastelands around the citadel. Although it does raise the question.... if Time Lords have kids do they pass it on? We know the Doctor has a grandchild and a "daughter" and she can regenerate in her own way. But the child abuse is still really dark and this is basically eugenics. The Time Lords making themselves genetically superior.
29:00- You are teh timeless child!!!!! Right, my own feelings aside. You've decided to give the Doctor a massive new origin story and have made THE DOCTOR A CHILD ABUSE VICTIM? Taken the blank slate that was the pre Hartnell era, stuck the current Doctor in the most passive helpless state and do this?
30:00- Ryan seems to think the bloke living in a tent has deliberately chosen to not build doors. Well done Ryan. Ryan also finally gets to live his Call of Duty dreams. The Cyberfam turn up. Its dorky but kind of fun.
33:00- HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA. All this time. All that set up. Bringing back Jack and you kill off the Lone Cyberman like that. HAHAHAHAHAAAA. I mean I suppose with the death particle you've killed anything interesting left so now you might as well but jesus. What a waste. Good job the CyberGoo didn't use any of those powers we saw it use just a couple of eps ago..... again.
Still I do love the TCE and the little tiny Cyberman.
The Master now reveals he is having suicidal thoughts which is extremely odd for a man with a bunch of plans going on. Characterisation that makes little sense and by the end seems even less so. A word about Sacha Dhawan as the Master. I think he is amazing..... but I'm not sure I really like just how over the top he gets. At points I feel more like I'm watching the joker. I'm not even sure Simm under RTD was THIS mad.
36:00- Apparently the Time Lords lied to create a "noble creation myth" I'm not really sure what this is meant to mean seeing as I think this is actually the first time we have had how they discovered regeneration explained. I think we would all expect it to be something along the lines of a studying a natural process and developing it. Like basically any form of medical breakthrough. This just involves abduction and probably repeated child murder. I can kind of understand the Masters anger. In his mind anyway but.... both being Time Lords that can regenerate they of course share some DNA. I mean.... THATS HOW IT WORKS.
37:00- SHOW ME THE REST the Doctor shouts. No, how about you go and look for it? You discover it. You do something other then stand around being told this? Nah best have it explained to you.
37:30- Tom Clancy's Time Lord The Division tm. Right here we really go? Is this it? The real thing Cribbers wants to get to? The idea of a secret club of interfering Time Lords? And the Doctor was one of them? Mate with Gallifrey back you could have just had them running about doing whatevs whenever. And the Doctor goes off and interferes all the bloody time! Even FOR the Time Lords. So now the Doctor says she has been seeing images of Ireland in her head. This is TOTAL strawberry floating BULLSHIT. At no point in the previous ep do we see her react like she sees them. Or that its linked directly to her in anyway. This is beyond piss poor. It's a joke.
38:30- REDACTED. How very lucky the Time Lords went to the trouble of scribbling out all this info they didnt want getting out expect those other bits. Again, if the Doctor was discovering this first hand not only would it be more dramatic it wouldn't need shite like this to create false suspense. Crucially its "all but erased". Meaning its still there. This is important.
39:30- So Tecteun put a filter on the Matrix data so it looked like Ireland so it wouldn't be remarkable. But also it was redacted but not enough of it was so wtf? You are trying so so soooooooooooo hard to be clever Cribbers but frankly, you are not. You try and explain it as a kind of clue left behind by Tecteun for the Doctor but this person wiped her memories clean and the Master beamed the Irish stuff into the Doctors head. Not the unfiltered stuff. The Irish bits. As before, bullshit. The truth is this is a mess of bollocks. Mushy cardboard bollocks.
41:30- So now its time for the Cybermasters. And I thought the drones where stupid looking! LOL. Ok in fairness if you are gonna do this you might as well go for it. Fair enough. I think I could just stomach it better if they hadn't appeared so soon. Like if this was after a period of time. The idea of of Time Lord Cybermen has legs but wouldn't this have worked so much better if they had actually been the ones that took out Gallifrey and converted them? Rather then Master puppets? It's wasted here. Plus I have no idea how dead Time Lord parts can regenerate. I mean if they could they wouldn't be dead. The Master must have spent ages making this stuff and designing these suits. How very suicidal of him.
44:00- The fam make it to Gallifrey. Note- its Yaz that crosses over first. The one who is meant to have the sense of adventure. Like I said, she is the one of the 3 that would most work alone. A good choice.
45:00- Ruth Doctor is here now. To say it doesn't matter that her life isn't what she thought it was. Er ok. If you like. I suppose its about what you are now that matters and what you do etc. More on that later though.......
48:00- So the Doctor is going to break out of the Matrix by remembering all the life she has had including the bits she doesnt remember and only knows about it because it is in the Matrix. She overloads the Matrix WITH DATA IT ALREADY HAS. This is monumentally stupid. Even when you ignore thats its capable of storing ALL Time Lord knowledge. IT ALREADY KNOWS THIS STUFF. This is so bad. Oh and somehow it causes the white rings of rigidity to die. This makes total sense of course. Maybe they should have just not been there? Oh and using the main theme is so on the nose here its feels banal to me.
49:00- The fam have found the Doctor in this massive place! So here we go.... can confirm, the lady says there is a myth around the Lone Cyberman and the death particle will take out all organic life on a planet. She does not know about the shrinking. How convenient to suddenly apply a limit to the death particle. I can actually see the stitches in the script breaking up through the tv screen. So now the Doctor is suggesting a genocide on Gallifrey is the solution. We've seen this before eh Cribbers?
53:00- Apparently the Master left behind the CyberMini with the death particle. The Master and his batshit plans eh. He must of known the Doctor would blow the Matrix and the prison force field thing and then go and fine it. Oh and the Cybermen start attacking again. They miss. Their ship goes boom. The action scenes in this story are dreadful.
55:00- Man I love this set. So much better then the actual TARDIS set we have. The Doctor says she will die to save this universe and her fam.... "in a heartbeat". As she leaves the door shuts behind her.
58:00- The Master says he wants to conquer everything now he has the CyberMasters. Again. Very suicidal.
59:00- The Doctor explains that finding out about her past has made her more, by making her herself. So basically finding out about her past has changed nothing as she will still be the Doctor and do Doctor things. But now she is "more". The change is there is no change. But she says she is "so much more then you" to the Master. Which is very..... errrr.... iffy. She is more because she has the special DNA? Like I said this is eugenics and she says she is more. And I know this is accidental, but man is it strawberry floating odd to have a white person say this to a coloured person in this context. But then I think back to the Doctor leaving the Master to the Nazis and basically uses racism as a trap against him. Again I don't think this is intentionally racist, just clumsy and somewhat tone deaf. Like how we regularly get mixed messages about using weapons and how apparently its terrible that the Time Lords wiped her memory but it was fine for the Doctor to do that earlier in the series. The Cribbnel era just hasn't got a handle on its own themes. This is the Doctor claiming a superiority over the Master because she is the special one.
1:01:00- We've seen this before from Parting of the Ways and it was soooo much better then. 9 got lucky with Rose being Bad Wolf for sure but he was prepared to die rather then commit another genocide. The Master eggs on the Doctor to do something she just claimed she would do in a heartbeat. The Master is very happy to be destroyed just having built his new CyberMasters. The Doctor hesitates and doesn't press the button.
1:01:30- Then the old bloke appears. Saying he followed her out (the door did shut btw). None of the CyberMasters shoot at him or even react to the situation. The Master doesnt attempt to stop him even during the chat they have. The old bloke suddenly lets out some stuff about him being the reason the CyberGoo ends up back in time like he had access to time travel tech or something I really dunno I dont care because its out of nowhere.
1:02:00- Then it happens. IT happens. The Doctor runs off and lets the bloke do the genocide instead. Palms off the responsibility to someone else. Lets someone else die because she didn't have it in her. She actually lets this happen. I think one of the worst things is at no point does the Doctor try and find an alternative. Doesn't use the Death Particle as a bargaining chip. Doesn't try to talk him out of it. There isn't a failed plan. Its just I'm gonna do a genocide and then I'm not and I'm going to pass the buck. In a heartbeat eh?
You hear the Master give some orders which means he survives. How very suicidal of him.
1:03:00- hahahahaaaa. The TARDIS house. Man I do love a chameleon circuit joke. Wonder what happens when the council find out. "She got us hurm." That she did Yaz. That she did. Please all of you just stay there.
"What? What? What?" I'd say this was a nice throwback but given how much Cribbers has lifted from other things, mainly RTD, I just found this irritating.
I knew the Daleks were coming up. Was leaked ages back. In fact so long ago I wondered if they would turn up at the end of this series. Lets hope its better then the last Dalek story.