Minor faults picked, however, there was far more to love about Capaldi’s swansong, even if it did leave us with the niggling feeling that potentially one of the series’ finest Doctors had never quite been handed the story his striking balance of compassionate and sinister deserved. (Photo: BBC)Īttentive long-timers might also have rolled their eyes at the Captain’s predictable relationship to a classic character, although in all fairness, the reveal was far more deftly handled than the same character’s previous, horrifically clunking ‘cameo’ in 2014.

Occasional quick-fix solutions sprang out of nowhere, in the absence of real earned progress for example, a diversion to visit Rusty the ‘good Dalek’, last seen in 2014’s ‘Into the Dalek’, on an admittedly stunning and atmospheric dead armoury planet at the heart of the universe or with the quick technical reset which saved a character’s life all too easily at the end. There was also more ammunition for past complaints aimed at showrunner Steven Moffat’s seven-year reign, which also ended here. The glass woman effect (played in the flesh by Nikki Amuka-Bird) was, it’s fair to say, a low point of a reasonably strong episode, with the admittedly higher-budget Terminator 2 having done better 26 years ago. Also present were Pearl Mackie’s returning Bill Potts (although she couldn’t quite remember how she ended up here), and Mark Gatiss as a First World War Captain plucked from the battlefield at Ypres in the split second before his death. These two regenerative rebels, we discovered, had been brought together at the moment of their ‘death’ by a time-travelling supercomputer from the future named Testimony, represented by a female avatar made of glass. Like Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor, Hartley/Bradley’s First initially refused to accept his own regeneration after being fatally wounded. Having once before played original Doctor William Hartnell in the 50th anniversary ‘An Adventure in Time and Space’ in 2013, Bradley returned here as the late Hartnell’s character, the original Doctor himself. Most surprising of all his companions – as we first saw at the end of July’s previous episode ‘The Doctor Falls’ – was David Bradley as, well, himself. This episode, however, was all about Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor, even as a strong cast of unexpected returnees and new characters gravitated around him during his final moments.

Twice upon a time doctor who