[Warning: The next accommodates spoilers for the Season 12 finale of Physician Who. Learn at your individual threat!]
Doctor Who went again to Gallifrey on Sunday evening, and as promised, it was explosive. The Season 12 finale, titled “The Timeless Kids,” shook the foundations of the Physician’s (Jodie Whittaker) identification, revealing a game-changing secret buried deep in her personal previous. Additionally, the Cybermen wore Time Lord headdresses. There was one thing for everybody.
However the greatest twist of the Season 12 finale — other than the truth that Graham (Bradley Walsh), Ryan (Tosin Cole), and Yaz (Mandip Gill) all made it again to present-day Earth alive, regardless of heavy foreshadowing that we is likely to be shedding a companion this episode — was the reply to the thriller of the Timeless Baby. It is confirmed: The Baby is the Physician.
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The Grasp (Sacha Dhawan) brings his finest enemy to the charred stays of Gallifrey and lays all of it out: Gallifrey is just not the Physician’s residence planet. She comes from one other dimension. When she was younger, she was adopted by an early Gallifreyan, who ultimately found the Kid’s regenerative powers and turned her right into a check topic. Over time, Gallifreyans had been capable of splice the power to regenerate into their genetic make-up, in order that they gave themselves a pompous new title — Time Lords — and have become the ruling elite. The one a part of this twist that does not shock the Physician is that the Time Lords are the worst.
As for why she would not keep in mind any of this, final week’s “Eire” subplot involving Brendan (Evan McCabe), the cop who could not die, is our greatest clue. The Time Lord Matrix has redacted a lot of the Kid’s historical past, however Brendan’s story was hidden within the system: The stereotypical Irishness was only a visible filter put over the Timeless Kid’s story so it would not be observed. This implies it is a secure wager the Physician’s reminiscences had been erased, as Brendan’s had been — possibly a number of instances. What we do know is that the Baby went on to serve for a secretive Time Lord unit referred to as the Division. We additionally know the Physician lived a number of lives earlier than the childhood she remembers on Gallifrey, which explains the place Jo Martin‘s history-making Doctor matches into the image. It additionally explains the Morbius Medical doctors, launched within the 1976 story “The Mind of Morbius,” from the Tom Baker years. Traditional Doctor Who followers are popping bottles tonight!
However historical past can solely take the Physician up to now. Martin’s Physician will get the road of the evening when she seems to our Physician to assist her course of her new origin story, reminding her, “Have you ever ever been restricted by who you had been earlier than?” As a lot as this episode is anxious with the previous, Physician Who needs to be rooted in hope for the longer term — if it weren’t, it would not imply something that the present continues to be breaking new floor with its title character. Coming from the present’s first black Physician to its first feminine Physician, the road felt like a reminder that progress is at all times potential, even within the midst of reckoning with a society that is constructed on exploitation.
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As for the remainder of the episode, the shortest model is that the Grasp lets free. He converts all of the lifeless Time Lords on the planet to Cyber Masters, merging Cyber expertise with the Time Lords’ regenerative powers. If the Cyber Masters ever left the planet there can be no stopping them, so the Physician decides to sacrifice herself to save lots of the universe. The secret is a dying particle, contained within the Lone Cyberman’s swimsuit, able to wiping out all natural life on the planet. After reuniting together with her fam on Gallifrey (heck of a solution to present her mates her residence), the Physician sends them again to 21st century Earth in one in every of Gallifrey’s many classic TARDISes (TARDII?). “Stay nice lives,” she tells her mates, giving me actual Ninth Physician-saying-goodbye-to-Rose vibes. Then she straps the miniaturized Lone Cyberman to a bomb and prepares to detonate it, figuring out it’ll additionally kill her.
The Grasp tries to speak her down utilizing the previous “this makes you a killer like me” argument, which is frankly drained and the Physician ought to know higher. (I believe she did; I am guessing her hangup was with killing the Grasp greater than something.) Proper as she hesitates, Ko Sharmus (Ian McElhinney) arrives to detonate the bomb within the Physician’s place, giving her simply sufficient time to make a break for it in one other TARDIS. Does this imply we have seen the final of Sacha Dhawan’s Grasp? Contemplate this my official plea to showrunner Chris Chibnall: Logic has by no means utilized to the Grasp earlier than, and it should not begin now. Deliver again Dhawan’s Grasp!
Anyway, there’s simply sufficient time for one closing shock. The Physician will get again to her TARDIS solely to be intercepted by the Judoon, who put her beneath arrest and zap her to an area jail. What higher solution to finish a season than with a baffled “What??!” from the Physician? See you all back here for the holidays.
Some notes:
-“Look upon my work, Physician, and despair” was a low-key solution to repay saving Percy Shelley’s life, and I respect it.
-“Are you struggling comfortably? Then I will start.”
-I cried at Graham’s praise to Yaz. It additionally positively made me suppose one in every of them would die. How lengthy can this fam dodge horrible penalties?
-Love how underwhelmed the Grasp is by robots. “What if we workshop this?”
-“Oh shoot, I ought to’ve stated, ‘Any person wants to chop you right down to measurement,’ then zapped you.”
-“Yaz, I am unable to get this hat off.”
Physician Who returns to BBC America for a vacation particular on the finish of 2020.