Doctor Who: A Fix With Sontarans

There were two big knock-on effects from the decision to start Colin Baker’s run of Doctor Who with his own adventure at the end of season 21 instead of a final-minute regeneration and a nine or twelve month break like it usually happens. First, Colin became the Doctor on all the merchandising immediately, which made for some very, very strange comics. Steve Parkhouse was scripting the monthly strip for Doctor Who Magazine and he suddenly had a new Doctor and no idea what his personality would be like.

You sometimes see people really praise the resulting run of comics – “Polly the Glot,” “Voyager,” and “Once Upon a Time Lord” – as though they were the high point of the strip. I’ve never been quite as wild about them myself, but the depiction of this brash and boisterous Doctor as a quiet and contemplative figure is unusual and effective, and the visuals are really something else. The run was drawn by John Ridgway. Later on in the strip, Ridgway would just provide pencils for Tim Perkins to ink and I’ve never been as interested in those, but the first two-thirds of the Colin series, with Ridgway’s beautiful inks, look amazing. It’s a pretty good run of stories overall, with a couple of Grant Morrison tales, and those first three in particular suggest a path the television adventures might have taken, with Colin Baker playing a Doctor far less garish. I’d certainly rather reread “Voyager” than watch most of these TV stories again.

The other big knock-on was that young Gareth Jenkins’ grandmother had time to knit a Sixth Doctor costume for him. Gareth, then eight years old, wrote into a popular BBC program where the host granted wishes, asking to meet the star of his favorite show. Script editor Eric Saward hammered out a seven minute adventure set in the TARDIS console room, Janet Fielding was asked to swing by Television Centre as Nicola Bryant was on vacation, and the two tall actors who wore those Sontaran suits with the ill-fitting collars were asked to bark out some menacing dialogue and die in a waterfall of green goo.

“A Fix With Sontarans” is Doctor Who aimed specifically at kids who dream of flying away in time and space with their hero. For adults, it’s just more of Eric Saward choosing to write nothing for the characters to say beyond insults and arguments. But for kids, it’s just perfect wish fulfillment. Our son thought this was completely wonderful, and the lucky sprog got to walk away with one of those big prop laser rifles. Our kid was jealous. Me too, come to think of it.

This little story is no longer commercially available. Some years later, after he died, a police investigation concluded that the host of the program, who had been one of the BBC’s biggest light entertainment celebrities for something like thirty years, had committed dozens of crimes against minors. None of the material that he hosted – including several hundred installments of Top of the Pops, where he had been one of the rotating emcees since the mid-sixties – is available any longer, and none of it can be repeated. “A Fix With Sontarans” was included as a bonus feature on the original edition of the DVD of “The Two Doctors.” When it was upgraded as a special edition with better picture and sound, “Sontarans” was omitted. So if you click the image above, you can go buy a copy of the “Voyager” comic instead.

Doctor Who: Resurrection of the Daleks (parts three and four)

If you read around, you’ll find some stories about how the American movie version of “Resurrection of the Daleks” was edited together from a complete cut of the first half, and a rough cut, lacking music, voiceovers, and sound effects, of the second. These stories don’t really explain how weird, ridiculous, and strange the experience was. Lionheart, the company that syndicated Doctor Who in the US in the 1980s and 1990s, made all sorts of dumb decisions about the prints that they offered stations, but one of the worst was not phoning the BBC to get a replacement copy. We were stuck with that thing for years.

Bear in mind that for a long time, your average American viewer might not have had any idea that these 90-minute adventures were edited movie versions of four-part serials. There were clues that something was up, though. There were occasional editing hiccups, like the one halfway through “Arc of Infinity.” For some reason, the editor used the end of part two rather than the recap at the beginning of part three, so the shot of Sarah Sutton has the sound of the cliffhanger “sting” over her face right before the credits rolled.

So with “Resurrection,” halfway through, there’s the clumsiest edit in the universe. Rodney Bewes’s character says “I’m a Dalek agent,” and the screen goes black for a half-second, and then picks up halfway through a Dalek shouting “-terminate” and there isn’t any music or sound effects anymore. This makes some of the scenes completely comical. When the actress playing the civilian advisor to the military is deafened by a weird sci-fi sound, there isn’t actually any sound. She just falls over with her hands over her ears making odd noises. Another scene doesn’t have a pair of voiceovers by Terry Molloy, so he just opens a door and closes it for no apparent reason. Then there’s a trooper who gets shot in part four. With the music blaring, you can barely hear him, but without the music, he steals the scene when he yodels “Eeee-ohhh-urrrrp!” before falling over.

I wasn’t a big buyer of the Who VHS range. The tapes – at least the American tapes manufactured by CBS/Fox, were notorious among some of my friends for being bargain-basement quality. But I did buy the VHS of “Resurrection” just so I could see the second half as it was meant to be seen and heard!

While our son absolutely loved all the Daleks blowing each other to pieces, the most interesting thing to me about this story is that it writes Tegan out in a remarkably grim and unhappy way. The whole thing is relentlessly bleak – not just the entire supporting cast, but literally every character we see onscreen at all, save the resourceful mercenary Lytton and his two guards, all die – and part three of the story doesn’t just tread water as part threes in Doctor Who generally do, it’s tediously violent and gruesome while also barely advancing the plot. And so this is the point where Tegan decides that she just can’t stand it any more, and leaves. I think the final punch in her gut is the Doctor telling her that he intends to murder Davros. So when it’s finally safe to go because everyone is dead, she shakes the Doctor and Turlough’s hands and she’s gone before she bursts into tears. It’s so abrupt and sad, and it’s always punched me in the gut.

I was talking with our son two nights ago about the idea of fan theories. He was talking with some other kids about connections in the Pixar universe, and how Andy’s mom in Toy Story might have been Jessie’s original owner. I told him that there were all sorts of fan theories in Doctor Who and that I’d tell him about one in a couple of days. That’s because the previous day, I saw that somebody had suggested that the gun used in the most recent episode, “Resolution”, came from the warehouse in this adventure.

A couple of other theories come to mind about this story. Tegan leaves with literally nothing but the clothes on her back. She doesn’t even have a handbag, and that miniskirt doesn’t look like it has pockets. I think she made a collect call and phoned her grandfather, who we met in “The Awakening,” and he took the train up from Little Hodcombe to get her.

I was reminded of one of the many great ideas that Virgin’s line of Doctor Who novels introduced in the 1990s. At one point, the Doctor’s companion Bernice is left abandoned in 1909 and makes use of the Doctor’s bank account. At some point, the Doctor realized that it might be a good idea to have a resource available to any of his companions that get stranded or stuck in the UK, and time travellers should be pretty good about taking advantage of compound interest. I figure that’s part of Companion Orientation, getting the account number and a couple of withdrawal slips, and maybe an ATM / debit card for when you’re on the right side of the 1980s, so that when you call it off because it’s not fun anymore, you can take out a few hundred pounds to get your life back in order. All Tegan would need is proper identification… so maybe she should have grabbed her purse!

Doctor Who: Resurrection of the Daleks (parts one and two)

Yeah, that’s the Doctor carrying a pistol. I’d ask what the writer was thinking, but the writer was the program’s script editor Eric Saward, who had a very strong interest in telling stories about tough guys with guns. One of the tough guys with guns in this story is a mercenary working for the Daleks called Commander Lytton, played by Maurice Colbourne, and it’s fairly obvious across this story and the character’s next appearance that Saward would much, much rather have been working on a program called Commander Lytton, Space Badass.

Joining Colbourne in this story is Rodney Bewes, yet another example of the show casting a really recognizable face from a sitcom. Bewes is best remembered as one of The Likely Lads, a much-loved comedy from the sixties and seventies, and was also the straight man to the puppet Basil Brush for many years. This is the first adventure to feature Terry Molloy in the role of Davros. Molloy seems to try to make Davros much more disgusting, with a constant mouthful of spit and bile, than either of the previous actors to play him did.

When I was thirteen or fourteen, “Resurrection of the Daleks” was one of my favorite adventures, because it’s a story with lots of tough guys talking macho, and lots of guns, and, in our son’s favorite moment – most kids’ favorite moment, I bet – a Dalek gets shoved out a second story window and blows up when it lands dome-first on the pavement. I kind of prefer these less invincible Daleks, honestly. I think this story has aged very, very badly, but our kid, who was already riding high on the thrill of a much more invincible Dalek in Tuesday night’s new episode, “Resolution,” was in heaven.

More to talk about in the serial’s second half, though, so stay tuned!

Doctor Who: Frontios (parts three and four)

Well, how nice. There’s a scene with Janet Fielding in her awesomely eighties outfit and one of the big bug monsters. Saves me the trouble of taking two pictures.

From the perspective of watching TV with my kid, the most interesting surprise about “Frontios” is that he was much more frightened by it than I was expecting. There’s a grisly body horror aspect to the story – it’s really driven home in writer Christopher H. Bidmead’s novelization of the script for Target Books’ line, which is downright disgusting – which centers around the bug monsters’ excavation machine. They need living humanoid minds to run the thing, and so the cliffhanger to part three reveals that a character everybody thought was dead is still hanging on, zombie-like, inside the machine. Our son volunteered that this was the scariest adventure since “Pyramids of Mars”, which remains his benchmark for scary Doctor Who.

From my own perspective, there’s a surprising revelation that the most intelligent bug monster, the one who controls all the others, is surprisingly well-read for bug monsters. He knows about Gallifrey and TARDISes, but he also specifically has heard of the Doctor. This may be one of the first occasions in the show where our hero’s reputation has preceded him quite this much. You can imagine Young Steven Moffat jumping at what a great idea it is that the Doctor’s such a big-shot legend.

It’s established that the Tractators are very long-lived specifically, and we can infer that their species has been around, digging up planets, for many millions of years, since Turlough’s home planet was once infested with them, and this story is set so far in the future that the Time Lords forbid TARDISes from going any farther. Perhaps the rank-and-file digger bugs just shuffle about in their tunnels while the bright one goes out, reads the papers, and stays abreast of cosmic events. He talks a lot, in his awesomely eighties electronic-synthesizer voice, so maybe he’s been gossiping with all the villains from all the other set-so-far-in-the-future stories about who beat ’em.

Doctor Who: Frontios (parts one and two)

“Frontios” is the story with the big ugly monsters that look like wood lice. We may get a clear shot of them for the picture in tomorrow’s post. Our son was doing an admirable job being quite surprisingly freaked out and bothered by what’s happening on the far distant colony planet in this story, so I turned to look at him as the beasts are revealed. You know that scene in so many science fiction movies where the heroes wander right past the pile of rocks that turn out to be a walking rock monster as soon as their backs are turned? Well, that happens here, as two of these big insects helpfully hide their faces against a wall leaving their shells facing toward Mark Strickson and one of this story’s co-stars. The humans leave the frame, and the big bugs turn around and follow them.

I was expecting a gasp, or a cry, or the shielding of our son’s trusty security blanket. Instead he went “Bleugh!” and didn’t stop with the “yucks” until several minutes after the show. “This is terrible! Those Tractator things are disgusting!” Oh, to be seven again!

“Frontios” is… okay. It’s another one of those stories where the running time would be halved if the besieged good guys would just accept the Doctor’s help instead of thinking he’s the villain. This is often a bore, but never more so than here, when in order for the Doctor to be the villain, he’d have to had started bombarding this colony with meteorites literally three decades previously. I mean, at some point in the last thirty years, the theory that the meteorites are just a softening-up technique before the invasion would have gone back on the shelf.

The besieged people are all stupid and unsympathetic, and guest star Peter Gilmore is stuck playing the far-future version of some dumb general like Thunderbolt Ross. Writer Christopher H. Bidmead came up with an interesting scenario and it’s nice to see the Doctor dig around and investigate things, but he really wants to leave this planet as soon as possible, and who can blame him?

I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy rereading Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood’s About Time series of Who guidebooks, well, the first six of them anyway, and I give each story a preview look in their books to remind myself what to watch for. That’s especially important with “Frontios,” which I’ve always remembered as a middling-to-mediocre story that doesn’t hold my interest. I was surprised to read that both writers are extremely complimentary toward this adventure and hail it as a really unique and original story. Two episodes in, and honestly the most memorable things about it, in no particular order, are the Doctor’s “brainy specs,” Janet Fielding’s leather miniskirt, and the silly bug-monster costumes. Then I read a little further and the authors went on to make the quite mad claim that Doug McClure wasn’t in Warlords of Atlantis with Peter Gilmore, when he most emphatically was. Writers! Never trust ’em!

Doctor Who: The Awakening (parts one and two)

A while back, I said that in the mid-eighties, Doctor Who got complacent. Example one: “The Awakening” is the first story since “Black Orchid” two years previously to have no returning villains. As such, it’s really a breath of fresh air. It’s also incredibly fast-paced for the period, proving that quite a lot of Doctor Who could have been done in about half the time, and it makes the two serials on either side feel even slower by comparison.

I’m happy that “The Awakening” gave our son a couple of good frights. He said this one was very scary, and he hid under his blanket at least three times. It’s about a big stone creature called the Malus that’s been hiding in a church wall for centuries. It feeds on psychic energy and possesses lesser beings into committing violence to feed itself. There’s some guff in the script about spaceships and probes from the planet Halkol to keep this from being a simple, old-fashioned ghost story. All you need to know is that it’s a big animatronic face in a wall that roars and belches smoke and makes people want to kill each other. This may not be art, but it’s a trillion times better than “Warriors of the Deep.”

Joining our heroes this time out, there’s a great guest cast. Back in “Kinda,” the Doctor basically took guest star Nerys Hughes on as his companion of the story. This time, it’s Polly James, who was Hughes’ co-star from the seventies sitcom The Liver Birds. (Oddly, very little of that show – only two of its nine series – has been released on DVD. Still, only £15.09 right now, I might pick that up…) Anyway, as much as I like Janet Fielding, it’s fun watching Peter Davison explaining all the space stuff to good actors with good comic timing like Polly James. Plus, there’s the great Glyn Houston as a villager who finds himself on the heroes’ side, and Dennis Lill as the main baddie.

I also like the way this story ends, with a pile of guest stars agreeing with Tegan and Turlough that it’s high time the Doctor takes a break and everybody’s just going to stay on Earth for a few days. That’s partially because it’s a cute scene, and partially because I’m very naughty and once had an audience laughing hysterically as I made up some very inappropriate fanfic to horrify a very “trad” fan in an explanation what the Doctor got up to in Little Hodcombe. It ended with her screaming “There’s no canonical evidence that happened!”

But I also like the idea that one day in Little Hodcombe, the Doctor was reading the newspaper and saw that there was a charity cricket match in the nearby village of Stockbridge. If you are not familiar with Marvel’s run of Fifth Doctor comics, then I can’t recommend them highly enough. They were written by Steve Parkhouse, and drawn by Dave Gibbons, Mick Austin, and Steve Dillon, and they fit almost perfectly in the space between this story and the next TV one. They’re all collected in the Panini edition The Tides of Time and are huge fun. (I say almost perfectly because they use the version of Rassilon that Parkhouse had invented for the comic in 1981, before he showed up in “The Five Doctors” as a totally different character. Just handwave it or call him Dumbledore or make up some inappropriate fanfic and it’ll all work out.)

Doctor Who: Warriors of the Deep (parts three and four)

Say what you will about “Warriors of the Deep,” but it’s the only time I’ve ever seen Ingrid Pitt try to kick a pantomime horse to death.

Doctor Who: Warriors of the Deep (parts one and two)

Our son tells us “there are two adjectives to describe this story: exciting and creepy!” That’s very generous of him. I’d have gone with “embarrassing and idiotic” myself.

“Warriors of the Deep” is the third and last serial for Doctor Who written by Johnny Byrne. It features the return of director Pennant Roberts, who never could stage a gunfight and, as we see here, still can’t. It also sort of features the return of the Silurians and the Sea Devils, only they’ve both been redesigned to look stupider and more fake than they did in the seventies, and the actors inside the ungainly costumes have been given instructions to move and talk as slowly as possible. I mean, the Silurians of 1970 moved and shouted like they were incredibly angry and frightened. These Silurians move and talk like they are drunk and the walls won’t stop moving.

Into all this mess, we’ve got a TARDIS that can get blasted out of orbit by a 21st-century satellite, a Doctor who is acting absolutely unhinged and decides to overload a nuclear reactor as a distraction, and returning villains scripted by a writer whose research went no further than a paragraph summary of the earlier stories in a Jean-Marc Lofficier guidebook. And there’s Ingrid Pitt and a pantomime horse.

Six weeks before this was shown, Doctor Who celebrated its twentieth anniversary, leading some bean counters and muckity-mucks at the BBC to ask, not unreasonably, why in heaven they’d let this silly show run for twenty years. Maybe twenty years was long enough, some of them said. Then this gets on the air.

Doctor Who: The Five Doctors

When I was a kid and comics cost 35 or 40 cents, Superman’s father Jor-El was so recognizable that he was regularly merchandised. There were dolls and action figures of the guy. DC’s writers and editors were almost pathologically obsessed with telling stories of Superman’s home planet. There was a World of Krypton miniseries, and even the Legion of Super-Heroes time-traveled back to meet him. It was all very, very boring and unnecessary to me.

With that in mind, in Terrance Dicks’ anniversary adventure “The Five Doctors,” we finally say goodbye to the Doctor’s home planet for a good while. It is the most boring and unnecessary place for our hero to ever visit, and this stale feeling is driven home by the actors who play Time Lords. This is the fourth story in seven years set on Gallifrey and exactly one actor – Paul Jerricho, as Commissioner “Castellan” Gordon – appears in two of them. Even the most important supporting character, President Borusa, is played by four different actors. How are we supposed to feel any connection to any of these people?

Fans just love kvetching and kibitzing about “The Five Doctors” and all its missed opportunities, but I think the biggest one comes in not addressing these unfamiliar faces. When the Master is shown into the president’s office, he addresses the three people inside. He says “President Borusa, Lord Castellan,” and then Anthony Ainley should have looked at the woman and said “I have no idea who you are.”

But everyone loves “The Five Doctors” anyway, because it’s a lighthearted anniversary celebration and it’s fun to watch Pertwee, Troughton, and Courtney squabbling again. Yes, Peter Moffatt’s direction is incredibly pedestrian and slapdash (count how many times actors don’t respond to objects that are clearly in their sight line), yes, they could have at least given us one clear and well-lit shot of the Yeti, and yes, surely while stuck in the TARDIS, the strange alien teenager and the Doctor’s granddaughter could have found something more interesting to talk about than “what do you think the Cybermen are doing.”

Yes, the Doctor’s granddaughter is in this, but Carole Ann Ford is only allowed to play Random First Doctor Companion. She calls her Doctor “Grandfather” twice and that’s it. This is apparently because the producer at the time insisted on presenting the Doctor as an asexual figure to avoid British tabloid journalists making rude headlines about Peter Davison and his attractive female co-stars in short skirts. That’s another huge missed opportunity and a scene we should have had: the fifth Doctor introducing his granddaughter to Tegan and Turlough.

Our son mostly loved it, as you’d expect. He did that standard grumble about the Master and the Cybermen and a Dalek showing up, but then he went eyes-wide and jumped with a huge smile when he saw the Yeti. He loved the famous “Cyber-massacre” scene, where about nine of them get impaled and decapitated before firing a single shot, but his favorite part of the whole story was when the third Doctor and Sarah “zip-line” down to the top of the tower.

I really enjoyed teasing our son with the strange possible-continuity-error brainteaser about Jamie and Zoe. Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury show up for a cameo as “phantoms” warning the second Doctor from going any deeper into the tower. The Doctor realizes that they’re fake when he remembers that Jamie and Zoe’s minds were erased of the period they spent with him. (The real error is that Troughton asks “So how do you know who we are.” They should both remember the Doctor, but Jamie shouldn’t know Zoe. Glossing over that, the important part is that neither should know the Brigadier. The line should have been Troughton pointing at Courtney while saying “So how do you know who he is.”)

It took our son a minute to wrap his brain around the problem. Where in his lifetime does the second Doctor come from if he knows about Jamie and Zoe’s memory wipe, when (we’ve been led to believe) that the very next thing that happened after the mind wipe was the Doctor regenerated and was shipped to Earth? I told him that we’d get a little more information about that in a couple of months, and that we’d see Patrick Troughton again in a different role in just a few days…

Doctor Who: The King’s Demons (parts one and two)

Fans often ask what in the sam hill producer John Nathan-Turner was thinking, deciding that Doctor Who needed a robot companion. These fans often forget that they were ever kids. When I read that Radio Times / Starlog 20th Anniversary magazine back in 1984, I was incredibly anxious to meet Kamelion, and incredibly confused that while he’s listed right there on page 20 as a companion, he isn’t mentioned in the previews for any of the forthcoming adventures.

Our son quite liked the appearance of Kamelion as well. It distracted from the Master showing up again, to his growling disapproval. Kamelion came about when its designers showed the robot to Nathan-Turner, thinking that an appearance on Doctor Who might be good for business. Nathan-Turner kind of went a little overboard with enthusiasm and made the robot a companion. Unfortunately, the robot required too much time-intensive and laborious programming to be reliable for a seat-of-your-pants TV show with frequent last-minute script changes, and then its chief programmer was killed in a tragic accident at sea. So instead of having the robot transform into a guest star of the week until they could write it out, they just didn’t mention it in any way whatsoever until they could write it out. Kamelion is completely forgotten onscreen, although fan writers and novelists have made sure that the robot had many more adventures.

Actually, you know what Kamelion reminds me of? In 1991, the designers of a much bigger robot showed it to Universal, thinking that an appearance on some new TV show might be good for business. Universal then sold NBC on a two-hour pilot called Steel Justice, in which a cop magically brings his dead son’s toy robot to life, leading to a twenty-foot tall “robosaurus” breathing fire at bad guys. The big difference is that Kamelion is probably housed in somebody’s collection, while the “robosaurus” can probably be seen at a monster truck show near you next weekend. (Nobody believes me when I tell them this, because the robot is just so stupid, but the whole angle of magically animating your dead kid’s toys made parts of that film quite eerie and odd. Nevertheless, NBC didn’t buy a series. Can’t imagine why…)

“The King’s Demons,” which was the last Who adventure written by Terence Dudley, isn’t all that exciting, but it’s a simple and short story which has lots of swordfighting and a joust, and an interesting collection of guest stars. Gerald Flood plays the imposter King John and provides the voice of Kamelion. Isla Blair and Frank Windsor play the local barons who are caught in the Master’s plot. I enjoyed how Windsor and his Softly, Softly co-star Stratford Johns both showed up in The Avengers a few weeks apart in 1968. It’s not quite the same, but Johns had been in a Who in 1982 and Windsor popped in the following year.

Doctor Who: Enlightenment (parts three and four)

On one end of the spectrum, there’s that run of Doctor Who stories in 2013 which is all about the mystery of Clara, the mystery of Clara, the mystery of Clara. On this other end in 1983, you’ve got this seventeenish year-old alien who was hanging out in a posh private school and making secret murder contracts with immortal evildoers and practically nothing whatever was mentioned about it. I just can’t help but feel there’s a comfortable medium somewhere between them.

As annoying as it got in the spring of 2013 having every single story revolving around the Doctor investigating what his companion is up to and who she really is, it was still preferable to the cone of silence that was dumped on Turlough. This could have been so interesting. There are whacking great chunks of “Terminus” where Tegan and Turlough literally have nothing to do because the plot is happening elsewhere, but instead of writing some dialogue about this new character, all they say is “we’ve got to get out of here.” All of “Terminus” was a missed opportunity, but I’ll go to my grave thinking they could have improved things by having the two just sidelined and waiting and talking. “So where are you from, and what were you doing on Earth?” Even if Turlough didn’t want to answer these questions – I suspect that nobody had really bothered at this point to figure them out yet – why wasn’t the incredibly inquisitive Tegan asking them?

There are a few scenes in “Enlightenment” where Turlough does seem to act like a cowardly kid around seventeen years old. Usually, he’s not depicted that way. He’s a nebulous early-twentysomething in the hands of the scriptwriters, and just as every subsequent adventure is going to forget that this one ends with Turlough asking the Doctor to take him back to his home planet, every subsequent adventure is going to forget that the character is a teenager.

I shouldn’t complain. The program is just about to forget a character entirely. You want to talk about slapdash…

Fans sometimes debate whether the Doctor knew that Turlough was in league with the Black Guardian, and whether the Doctor had the right to put Tegan and Nyssa in such danger by bringing him on board without telling them his suspicions. I kind of like the friction between the Doctor and Turlough, and at least it gave Davison, who was very, very frustrated by the experience of making the show, something different to do.

I think the problem is that “Enlightenment” doesn’t have a payoff. We can guess that the Doctor knew the Black Guardian was behind this from the beginning and had taken lots of steps that we didn’t see to ensure his enemy would lose. I’ll find a thing or ten to complain about Steven Moffat’s six seasons when we get there, but credit where it could be due: Moffat would have made the end of “Enlightenment” completely spectacular, and Davison could have played the hell out of a tables-turning scene where the Doctor reveals that he was steps ahead of his enemy the whole time.

Instead, the Doctor just stands there. It’s not an impressive ending.