Doctor Who: The Vanquishers (13x06)

I will say, this episode managed to make me feel the epicness in a way I wasn't expecting!

Cons:

But I will also say... nothing about this season was what I wanted it to be. It's a bummer, but there you have it. In some ways, it almost felt like the whole thing was a big-budget, convoluted, messy, unclear prologue to the kind of story I actually tune in to Doctor Who to watch. At the very end, we get this scene of Dan being invited to join the Doctor and Yaz on the TARDIS, going on fresh adventures. That's the show I wanted to watch. Instead, we'll get a couple of holiday specials with this gang, and then it's goodbye to our current regeneration and onto something new. I can't help but feel a bit disappointed.

I'll talk about the good parts of this chaos in a moment, but must first lodge my repeated complaint that this whole six-episode story has just been too crowded for me. I was happy for Vinder and Bel that they reunited, sure, but we spent quite a lot of time on these two characters, only for them to add very little in the end. We had every Doctor Who villain imaginable make a cameo, with the Sontarans and the Weeping Angels making up the biggest chunk of screen time, but then we also added in all this "end of time" nonsense, these baddies who want revenge on the Doctor for stuff she can't even remember... like I said, messy. Hard to know which pieces to focus on.

There's a Sontaran addicted to chocolate, and that's the weakness that gets a couple of the Doctor's friends into the spacecraft? Jeez. That was pretty weak. There were a few more goofy moments in this episode that work just fine in theory for a family show like Doctor Who is supposed to be, but decidedly don't match the tone of everything else going on.

Once again, I must say I don't approve of the epic-i-fication of the Doctor's backstory, as represented by all this stuff she can't remember, and how she's this legend that ties everything together and motivates the baddies to such acts of mass destruction. It's too much; I want things to be simple and more contained, but that's just not the direction of the show anymore, is it?

Pros:

Yaz and the Doctor remain a real highlight for me. Their hug was filled with so much warmth and relief, I really believed in the yearning, in how bad Yaz had been missing the Doctor. I definitely get the sense that they're in love, which I would absolutely adore to see play out, but probably won't. I also liked that the Doctor admitted she had been wrong to keep things from Yaz, and that she wanted to tell her everything. That was a nice culmination, and I do hope we get to see a bit of their repairing bond in our last few adventures with these two together.

While I might question the whole idea of the Doctor's big mysterious secret past, I will admit that scene at the end, where the Doctor consigns the secrets of her origins into the TARDIS, but then leaves the door open that she might ask to learn more later, was pretty amazing. Also, the heartbreak of the Doctor talking to someone who had once been her companion, but who she now cannot remember having had that close relationship with... oof. Ouch. That's kind of the good stuff, isn't it?

The whole opening section of this episode, bleeding through the majority of the runtime, of the Doctor being split in multiple places, was actually very effective. I love the way it was shot and paced. I keep saying I wish this had been a smaller, more intimate story, but it's not, and if I accept this for what is clearly is, I have to give props where they are due for the frenetic and intense way the scenes shifted around, the Doctor trying to deal with so many different inputs all at once. I loved the scene where she showed up to rescue herself, and then paused to do a bit of flirting with her own alternate self. Super cute and unique.

As I said before, I am happy for Bel and Vinder, and I do wonder if we'll be seeing them again/if Bel really is pregnant with the Doctor right now... that's a popular theory and I can see why. Mostly I just want to praise the actors, who did such a wonderful job with the joy of their reunion!

That's where I'll stop for now. I have reasonable hopes that these last few specials with Whittaker will be a good time. I hope we get some nice smaller moments in the TARDIS with Yaz and Dan and the Doctor, before things get shaken up once again...

7.5/10