Spoilers The Reality War grade and discussion thread

[Starkers]

So I enjoyed that a lot, I might even go as far as to call it one of RTD's best season finales (low bar I know).

I really didn't want Ncuti to go though, he's been wonderful and he hasn't been around nearly long enough. But he's going to be a huge star.

For the rest... a tale of two Anitas. Anita coming back from the time hotel yay! Anita Dobson cracking a two Ranis joke, double yay!

Thought Ruby got more to do than Belinda. Would be happy with either coming back.

Poppy is adorable!

Why did Rose (Nobel) appear but then disappear? Her acting's improved at least.

What happened with Susan? Heard a theory that maybe she originally was the one to help Ncuti with the regeneration but maybe the dynamic didn't work for some reason so they grabbed Jodie.

Thought Jodie was v good, surprised how pleased I was to see her

And Billie. Sadly I had seen the spoilers. I'm...ok with it *if* she's the Doctor. 2008 me would have hated the idea, 2025 me knows she's a great actress and could do a great job.

Oh yeah and who's "The Boss" I wonder?

 

[DigificWriter]

if* she's the Doctor

She's obviously The Doctor. RTD is just keeping his narrative secrets secret and playing around with fan/viewer expectations.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

So, that happened. Sadly, the Billy Piper thing got spoiled for me by careless comments in the RTD thread before it became a spoiler thread, but the Jodie Whitaker thing absolutely stunned me in a good way. Absolutely amazing to see her again.

By far the best moment of the whole thing.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Man, even an hour after, I'm still fuming. What a crushing disappointment, on almost every level.

Ncuti deserved better. Belinda deserved better. The Rani eaten by a giant skull giant version of Omega? The bigenerated Rani however survived?

 

[diankra]

It does feel a bit like RTD throwing a die again in the hope of recreating 2005.

 

[Turtletrekker]

As much as I love the fact that Jodie Whitaker flipped the script with the "oh you redecorated" joke with her own TARDIS by saying "I really like it", I love even more that she got to use the traditional version of the line here. Just goes to show you, Doctors like their own TARDIS's and nobody else's.

 

[Starkers]

She's obviously The Doctor. RTD is just keeping his narrative secrets secret and playing around with fan/viewer expectations.

Possibly, but I'm sure if she isn't the Doctor you'll pop back to admit you were wrong.

 

[diankra]

So I enjoyed that a lot, I might even go as far as to call it one of RTD's best season finales (low bar I know).

I really didn't want Ncuti to go though, he's been wonderful and he hasn't been around nearly long enough. But he's going to be a huge star.

For the rest... a tale of two Anitas. Anita coming back from the time hotel yay! Anita Dobson cracking a two Ranis joke, double yay!

Thought Ruby got more to do than Belinda. Would be happy with either coming back.

Poppy is adorable!

Why did Rose (Nobel) appear but then disappear? Her acting's improved at least.

What happened with Susan? Heard a theory that maybe she originally was the one to help Ncuti with the regeneration but maybe the dynamic didn't work for some reason so they grabbed Jodie.

Thought Jodie was v good, surprised how pleased I was to see her

And Billie. Sadly I had seen the spoilers. I'm...ok with it *if* she's the Doctor. 2008 me would have hated the idea, 2025 me knows she's a great actress and could do a great job.

Oh yeah and who's "The Boss" I wonder?

For the benefit of Americans who might not get the joke, The Two Ronnies was a long-running BBC comedy show with the catchphrase "And it's good night from me, and good night from him."
Charlton Heston was a fan, and guested in the final episode.

 

[JD]

So if everybody else hated it, how are their 7 8 rating including mine.
It definitely wasn't perfect, but I enjoyed it.
The ending of the Archie Panjabi Rani was perfect way of having her plotting come back to bite her in the ass. And the Mrs. Flood Rani is still around, so we could get a chance to see what she's like when she's not pretending to be human or subservient to the other Rani.
UNIT using the building to fight the bone monsters was fun.
It was great to see Anita again.
I was a little confused as to why Poppy came back Belinda's purely human when the whole point was that she was his daughter too.
I did not expect Jodi Whitacker's appearance, so that was a big surprise.
I have to admit, I cheated a looked at The Doctor's page before I watched it, so I knew going in he was going to regenerate into Billie Piper. I had heard the rumors, but I has assumed there was no way they were actually going to do that, and I'm shocked they actually did. I don't have a problem with her playing The Doctor, it just strikes me as a really desperate attempt on the part of the people in charge to get fan's attention.
I am a little surprised they didn't address the Doctor seeing Susan, I'm hoping they are saving that for next season or something, because it feels like kind of a weird thing to tease and then not address.

Tom Baker is still alive. He’s in his nineties, but I wouldn’t put it past the current production team to try to pull such a desperation stroke…

We already known at some point they will go back to that face, since we saw him as the Curator in The Day of the Doctor.

But IIRC she wasn’t a biological daughter and to the best of his knowledge she was dead?

She was his biological daughter since she was created from his genes.

 

[Captaindemotion]

Possibly, but I'm sure if she isn't the Doctor you'll pop back to admit you were wrong.

Are you new here?

 

[DigificWriter]

I was a little confused as to why Poppy came back Belinda's purely human when the whole point was that she was his daughter too.

Poppy being The Doctor's daughter was a corruption of reality.

 

[Starkers]

Possibly a controversial opinion but I'm glad Archie Rani got eaten and Mrs Flood Rani escaped to maybe come back!

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Though at a mere 74, Peter Davison is surely still viable…

Twenty years ago, Mark Gatiss thought Davison would make a great Doctor in his 50s.

We already known at some point they will go back to that face, since we saw him as the Curator in The Day of the Doctor.

Knowing that Murray Gold's unused piece of music for the Curator scene was titled "Song for Four" -- ie., the Fourth Doctor -- makes me think that the Curator is not a future Doctor who looks like Four. Rather, it's "Old Tom," as Lance Parkin puts in in Unhistory, a fourth Doctor who never regenerated.

She's obviously The Doctor. RTD is just keeping his narrative secrets secret and playing around with fan/viewer expectations.

As Dave Wasserman says on Election Night, "I've seen enough." Your certainty has me convinced -- Billie Piper is not the sixteenth Doctor.

 

[Captaindemotion]

Possibly a controversial opinion but I'm glad Archie Rani got eaten and Mrs Flood Rani escaped to maybe come back!

So now that Archie Rani is dead, will Anita Rani stop being a simpleton?

 

[JD]

I hope so.

Poppy being The Doctor's daughter was a corruption of reality.

But I thought her existing in the present day at all was a corruption of reality, so would it really have made that much of a difference if she was still The Doctor's daughter? Or was she real the whole time, and we just didn't see the parts of the conversations where they talked about her in the episodes.

 

[Starkers]

So now that Archie Rani is dead, will Anita Rani stop being a simpleton?

Sorry do you mean Anita Dobson Rani, or the journalist Anita Rani

 

[Captaindemotion]

Sorry do you mean Anita Dobson Rani, or the journalist Anita Rani

I actually had to google her - she’s clearly well-known but somehow flew under my radar!

 

[Qonundrum]

Never once mentioned on the TV show though. In fact the Doctor has stated that he had a family and children. And of course there's that whole "granddaughter" business from the very first episode.

Which can be anything. From general nuclear family lineage to adoption to metaphor to you name it.

 

[The Wormhole]

Doctor Who really is terrible with finales.

Okay, that was a bit too harsh. Truth is it was mostly a fun and enjoyable episode in that there was an engaging battle sequence. And it was nice to have Anita back as a proper companion, or as close to one as she's ever likely to be. I got to say, RTD seems to have a thing with big showdowns being talked out. The scene with the two Ranis in the UNIT command center felt just like the Doctor, the Master and Rassilon in TEOT or Jack having a standoff with the bad guys in front of the giant anus in Torchwood Miracle Day. Almost as bad as Moffat's monologues.

What really brings this episode down is Poppy disappeared everything drags on and on. With Ruby insisting Poppy was real and everyone doubting her, which really went on way longer than it should have. This even seems to get lampshaded a bit in Jodie Whittaker's cameo scene (a scene I do love, by the way) where she even says they're stretching the timelines too far and need to get on. Then the Doctor's goodbye with Belinda stretched on and on, which actually was starting to feel like Moffat territory in that I was starting to moan "get on with it" at the screen.

And so the Ncuti Gatwa era ends, with no indication when or if Billie Piper's term as the Doctor will officially commence, or even if she actually is the Doctor. For the record, I believe she is, but the fact she wasn't actually credited as "the Doctor" is going to be brought up in these discussions ad nauseum even though I have a feeling it'll end up being as relevant to the story as the costume change during the Whittaker to Tennant regeneration was.

Oh, I will say, the regeneration scene had some nice music. Sure, it's not Vale Decem, but it's a pretty damn good tune all the same.

 

[David cgc]

I hope so.

But I thought her existing in the present day at all was a corruption of reality, so would it really have made that much of a difference if she was still The Doctor's daughter? Or was she real the whole time, and we just didn't see the parts of the conversations where they talked about her in the episodes.

That also didn't make sense. The Doctor said that Poppy was real, suggesting that she wasn't a dream construct, but then he told Ruby she was a new person inspired by his memories of the Captain Poppy they met in "Space Babies," and the whole thing centered on her being a dream construct, because if she'd somehow been Captain Poppy yanked from some other time, she'd be as unambiguously real as everyone else and wouldn't have disappeared. And it doesn't explain her appearing in Lagos, either.

Remember when people said it was too confusing that we saw the invisible Silents and their invisible spaceship before they were formally introduced and we had to deduce that they were lying in wait at Amy's house to sabotage the TARDIS in "The Big Bang" and that the ship from "The Lodger" was the same one River and the Doctor shot up at the end of "Day of the Moon"?