Doctor Who 11.10

And so the season comes to an end, with... a whimper? A bang? More like a shrug.

It's the big finale with the return of TimShaw... and...? He's got a big plan to blow things up, but spends over three thousand years to do so and the Doctor only accidentally turns up. There is a lot of fluff around with planets and the Ux (I'll come back to them) and a planet that scrambles your mind... which doesn't actually lead to anything. (Seriously, what is the point of the scrambling? The Doctor immediately has a solution, and there is a moment of threat as she has to use it for the Ux (although she had a spare for Poltraki but no others), but it's just a moment of headache and... why did we bother? Especially when it doesn't seem to be a problem for the people they recuse from the stasis chambers.)

Fortunately TimShaw came across the Ux, a species that can create things out of nothing/faith... This feels like it should have been a slam on religion as the Ux just decides that any random being that teleports in must be the creator, but the episode treads really lightly and refuses to be more than implicit in anything approaching condemnation. (Although they talk about thinking changing the universe without once mentioning block transfer mathematics... so there's that at least.)

However, we do get the only good moment in Graham facing TimShaw and working out what kind of man he is. Usually that's the sort of moment that would be given to the Doctor, or a random guest star, but we have an actual character arc, and yeah, I'm genuinely pleased that Graham didn't go through with it. And Ryan has something to do with respect to Graham's arc. Which leaves Yaz to... also be in this episode.

For the end of the season of the Thirteenth Doctor... this is just nothing. It doesn't feel spectacular. It doesn't feel terrible either. It just... is.

Next Time: ...uh, what was that? Even five seconds? I got nothing.

[END]