Noise of the Doctor

Well, last night's season finale of Doctor Who certainly showed . . . something. It's hard to say what. It's the scribbled cherry on top of the muddled sundae.

The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) starts ordering the deceased Tecteun's ood around so that he can turn her into three Doctors starring in three Doctor Who episodes at once, edited together. In one episode, she's helping Bel (Thaddea Graham) and Karvanista (Craige Els) on their spaceship. She decides to crash the ship into a Sontaran ship because she guesses their force field will safely deflect and entrap them because, "People don't like being crashed into, they tend to take precautions." Apparently not considering such a precaution might simply be destroying ships hurdling towards them.

Another Doctor is underground with Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) who's barely around long enough to inform the audience she likes this regeneration of the Doctor. And a third Doctor is back being tortured by the sugar skull people.

The Doctor has a tearful reunion with Yaz (Mandip Gil). Apparently the Doctor is as close to her now as Ten was with Rose or Twelve was with Clara. I mean, it's possible, a lot evidently happened in between seasons, off-screen, where apparently Chibnall didn't think he should waste time with it.

Among the painfully lame lines throughout the episode, maybe the worst is in an action scene where a besieged Dan (John Bishop), Jericho (Kevin McNally), and Yaz are yelling at each other. Someone says, "We're defenseless!" and Yaz grabs a rope and announces, "We're never defenseless!" Not with Wonder Yaz around, I guess, who knows things about rope the boys will never have the wit to comprehend.

"We're never defenseless." Right. Everyone's gotta sleep some time, Yaz.

It seems like Chibnall resented how interesting Jericho managed to be in "Village of the Angels" because he concocts an impressively meaningless slapstick death for him. Fumbling his teleporter ring and then accidentally shooting it, he gets trapped on a crashing ship. Too bad he lacked Yaz's dexterity or he'd be alive to-day.

The resolution of the romantic subplot between Vinder (Jacon Anderson) and Bel (Thaddea Graham) flashes by as the episode rushes to fit into its run time. But it's not as bad as Dan and Diane (Nadia Albina). We spend more time with her than him in this episode as Vinder praises her blaster handling and survival skills. She joyfully reunites with Dan in the TARDIS, then casually passes on a date with him back in the Liverpool museum. We'll never know, I suppose, why Dan is rejected by the woman Vinder said should train at a future space marine academy. Maybe she was just fed up with the fact that he did volunteer work at the museum.

The editing in this episode feels like they had a first cut that ran two hours and decided to cut it down by randomly removing reaction shots. There's a scene where Vinder and Diane are trying to figure out how to get through an extradimensional wasteland when Diane says they need to jump in a river. And instantly, Vinder jumps in, we don't even get a moment where he ponders this strange idea. It feels like editing for a trailer.

I won't even go into the stupid scene with the Sontaran in the sweet shop.

So, we can at least say there wasn't one, big, concrete, stupid thing to piss everyone off in this episode. There was very little concrete about this episode.

Doctor Who is available on the BBC's iPlayer.