We’re a long way from the poetry of Heaven Sent/Hell Bent as finale titles, aren’t we? And in quality, too, but that’s a given. Inevitably, both of these episodes were really quite dreadful, in an exciting multitude of ways. Let’s dissect them in blog form.

I held off on reviewing Ascension because it was the first half of a story, but it still managed to fail as an episode in itself. One thing that interested me was that, like The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, we were primed to expect a mighty battle, but in both instances we were given the aftermath of a battle, which took place in a quarry. Indeed, and surprisingly, this finale and that finale shared a similar design scheme – bland quarries and bland factory/industrial areas doubling as spaceships. The episode might as well have been titled Ascension of the Sniperbots, because these weren’t Cybermen – they were generic shooty robots who can’t hit a single thing (and, go figure, they were primarily RTD-era Cybermen – with their black guns). Why were they trying to kill the last of the human race? They’re Cybermen. The point is to convert, not kill. But they seemed pretty trigger happy – again, Sniperbots. I think they even used the same sound effect. This episode had all the hallmarks of a Chibnall episode – tensionless and tedious action setpieces, bland over-expository dialogue, an expansive and forgettable guest cast, plot contrivances, characters shoved around a chessboard instead of acting naturally, and some interesting ideas squandered. Much of it is laughable – the idea that a Cyber warship was just left lying around with thousands of extra Cybermen on it, and that Yaz and Graham just happened to bump into it, which led Ashad to it, is particularly so, especially given the notion that giving Ashad the Cyberium is a deadly danger. Shouldn’t the Cyberium – a tactical planner, an AI, a vast collection of knowledge and data – have led Ashad to this treasure trove of extra troops, giving him the upper hand in the war? That makes much more sense than him kind of vaguely bumping into it. Something that’s been irking me since Jack’s non-appearance (and it really was just an arc tease – how pathetic) is the logistics around the Alliance sending the Cyberium back in time. Jack tells the Doctor not to give the Lone Cyberman (and we know now that he wasn’t even a lone Cyberman, so it can only be a nonsensical nickname clearly designed to market the arc) what it wants. But that must mean that he already knows it happens, because he’s aware that the Doctor will be forced into a confrontation with the Cyberman. But if he’s aware, and is trying to change the past, then he’s negating the events that led to the Alliance sending it back in the first place. I don’t even know why I’m wasting words trying to reason out something that no thought was given to, but here we are.

So the chesspieces are moved to the Boundary, at which Gallifrey appears. This is illogical, given that Chibnall thinks Gallifrey was in a parallel pocket universe (it wasn’t, but he probably hasn’t seen Hell Bent), but let’s just assume that the Boundary can reach across the multiverse. And then the Master appears, apropos of nothing; there’s no explanation given in The Timeless Children as to how he knew the Boundary would appear there at that specific time, and no particular reason as to why he’s waiting for it in the first place. Unless he’s waiting for the Doctor to get there, but then how does he know that she’s going to be on the other side? He clearly hasn’t made contact with the Cybermen yet. And why would even he even want to explain things to her? He made it quite clear in his message for her that she’d have to figure things out for herself. He jumps out, anyway, and yells ‘Wow! That’s a good entrance, right?’ Why does this version of the show have to be so masturbatory? From ‘Mastered the art of surprise’ to this. Who didn’t entertain the possibility that the Master might show up in an episode with a title that links directly to the mystery he set?

We move into The Timeless Children. In what possibly takes the award for worst ever cliffhanger resolution, Graham, Yaz, et al escape by opening a conveniently-located air vent as the Cybermen shoot around them. Why didn’t they do that before? Anyway, great. Yaz and Graham have a nice heart-to-heart – their second or third actual conversation in two series – where Graham tells the audience the things they should think about Yaz. We wouldn’t actually know what those are because Yaz is not a character but a walking exposition module. After, Graham comes up with the nonsensical idea of climbing in a Cyberman suit and sneaking off the ship. When Clara climbed into a Dalek shell in The Witch’s Familiar, her mind had to be connected up to the shell so she could control it. This makes sense – the metallic outer shell of the Dalek is just a vehicle, after all, for the mutated living life form inside. But the metal bodies of the Cybermen are – or should be, anyway – directly connected to the upgraded human tissue, so there should be no way of controlling the metal bodies unless the human inside has been upgraded. But that’s glossed over in favour of turning the Cybermen into generic robots. Which is Ashad’s plan, apparently – remove all organic components and ascend into pure robothood. Nonsensical. And utterly counter to the point of the Cybermen. It’s in the name!

At this point, the Master paralyses the Doctor and explains things to her for roughly half an hour. The Timeless Child was an alien with the natural ability to regenerate, discovered by a founding mother of Gallifrey and bio-engineered to create the Time Lord race. Quite why this is the Timeless Child and not, you know, the Deathless Child, is not explained. This isn’t a terrible origin for the Time Lords. But that child is, of course, the Doctor, who apparently grew up to become a member of ‘the Division’, some sort of Time Lord secret agency. After a fashion – teased in the intercut Brendan sequences of Ascension, which were actually flashbacks the Doctor was experiencing – the Time Lords wiped the Doctor’s memory and reverted her back to childhood, beginning the timeline we (and she) are familiar with.

It’s never communicated to us, of course, that the Doctor is experiencing those flashbacks. Or why she’s getting them now after 2000+ years. Or why the Doctor – the Doctor – would willingly work for the Time Lords. Or why they needed to wipe her mind and revert her to childhood. Wouldn’t just wiping her mind do? Or, chiefly, why this is even happening? And I mean that on a writing level. Why has Chibnall done this? What purpose does it serve?

The kicker for me, really, is the Doctor’s reaction. She is shocked at having had more lives than she remembers. She’s not shocked at having worked for a shady Time Lord organisation (“why would she be?” Chris Chibnall asks. “Policemen are good, haven’t you seen Broadchurch?”). But this reveal does not impact on her character in any way. And this is underscored in the narrative! Ruth appears, telling her that it doesn’t matter whether she’s had a portion of her life wiped away or not. It doesn’t change anything. She’s still the Doctor. Okay, fine. So what’s the point of doing this in the first place? This doesn’t impact anybody’s character. The Doctor, briefly shaken, is fine. Her companions don’t even find out about it, and it would be too labyrinthine for them to understand or care about. The only person it actually impacts it the Master, and unconvincingly at that. He’s so angry at the early Time Lords for having stolen an ability from the Doctor, one that he now shares, that he burns down the entire current society? I don’t buy it. It doesn’t impact the way he interacts with the Doctor at all; he gives no hint of anything in Spyfall, and seems to actually revel in the pain it’s causing in the finale. He’s got the stink of the Doctor’s blood (as he sees it) in his veins, enough to drive him to a frenzy, and he just interacts with her as normal, remaining calm, joking around, in Spyfall and the finale? No. I also didn’t particularly ever buy that he has the capacity to single-handedly destroy the Time Lords, but that’s a minor point.

RTD Redux/Moffat Revisionism continues. In one corner, we have the aforementioned RTD Cybermen, a weird riff on Rassilon’s speech in The End of Time, and ending the episode with a last-used-12-years-ago ‘What? What? What?’ (a comparison crowingly made by the official Doctor Who Twitter account itself). On the other hand, we have a complete denial of Missy’s existence – even when it would be logical to invoke it, like during discussions of good and evil – and the further defacement of Gallifrey, with the Cybership destroying a bit of the ruined Citadel and the Master having personally killed individual Time Lords and kept their bodies around, as if to make the future restoration of Gallifrey even more difficult. Moffat going out to bat for Chibnall’s terrible decisions – defending him even on his personal Instagram – while Chibnall does his best to reverse or ignore everything his predecessor did, while revering a man last involved in the show 10 years ago, makes the whole business even more distasteful. What’s even worse is that, as discussed previously, Chibnall is lifting the aesthetics of the RTD era without understanding why they work.

The episode ends by imitating the final sequence of The Parting of the Ways – the Doctor, hovering over a doomsday button in front of a massed group of her enemies. Except that episode, that moment, is rooted in character; the Doctor, in the end, cannot destroy the Daleks because he knows it will destroy humanity. We know that he’s replaying that final, terrible moment of the Time War in his head, but this time, proudly, he is a coward. It’s the natural summation of his development and presages an inevitable regeneration. He is healed – his work is done. And of course, because it’s Doctor Who, there’s always another way – Rose arrives and defeats the Daleks herself. Later, in The Day of the Doctor, we see a replay of this moment – the War Doctor hovering over the button, ready to press it and wipe out his own people, ashamed. But it’s Doctor Who, and there’s another way – the Doctors manage instead to save Gallifrey. There’s a beautifully moving segment in Steven Moffat’s novelisation of that episode where he links these two events together – when he declares he’s a coward to the Daleks, he thinks back to that moment in the barn and knows he’s a liar.

Enter Chris Chibnall. He nicks the moment without understanding why it works. The Doctor hesitates to press the button. Why? Are the ethics of genocide, suicide, wiping out her own people once again playing across her mind? Is she thinking of that moment in the barn, the moment on Satellite 5? No. Because Ko Sharmus – someone with whom she’s shared about five minutes of screen time – enters and does the deed for her. She leaves, willingly. It’s not that she can’t do it – she just doesn’t want to die. Melodrama, not drama. Now the Time Lords are dead, twice over, but at least there’s no blood on her hands. God forbid anyone in this era has to make an actual hard choice. It’s fitting that the episode ends with a classic Tennant ‘What? What? What?’, the timing for which Whittaker fumbles. Sums up the era, doesn’t it – an old idea, badly executed.

I understood when Chibnall wanted to refresh the show for Series 11. I liked that he wasn’t bringing back any old monsters in the name of trying to create an accessible jumping-on point. But I find it unfathomable that he now spends all of his time considering the RTD era the core text of the show and utterly ignoring the last 10 years of Moffat. I’m not going to bother defending the virtue of the Moffat era – I think it is unfairly maligned, obviously – but you would not get this seemingly weird, petty vendetta in any other show. At least I can take a grim satisfaction in how profoundly this era is failing. This is, easily, one of the worst Doctor Who stories ever produced. His era is undoubtedly the worst of the rebooted show. I genuinely find it unfathomable that these episodes could have been conceived, written and made by anyone except a dangerously incompetent production team. How can anybody watch 30 minutes of a paralysed, mostly-wordless Doctor having things explained to her?

There’s so much more to say. This version of the Master is irritating and without depth, an off-brand John Simm. The idea and design of the ‘Cyber Masters’ is ridiculous. The emotions are false and rote. The dialogue and characters are bland and interchangeable. The acting is poor, the direction ugly, the passionless, endless soft synth music a huge step down from Murray Gold. This is, sadly, a version of the show that is not fit for purpose. At this point I don’t think it deserves an audience.