The Doctor Falls: The Fact File
The read through for the episode took place on Tuesday, 21 February, 2017. It premiered on the 11th anniversary of The Army of Ghosts – appropriate as the events of The Army of Ghosts / Doomsday are referenced when the Doctor taunts the Cybermen about Canary Wharf.
Missy tells the Master, ‘I loved being you…’ The Tenth Doctor says the exact same thing to the Fifth Doctor when they meet in Time Crash, also written by Steven Moffat.
‘Without hope. Without witness. Without reward.’ If those words sound familiar it’s because the Doctor spoke them earlier this series, in Extremis.
When ‘Cyber Bill’ weeps, the single tear leaking from her mesh eye forms a visual echo of the ‘teardrop’ in the corner of the traditional Cyber-eye.
The Doctor’s jelly babies are back! Although most commonly associated with the Fourth Doctor, the Second Doctor and the Seventh Doctor enjoyed jelly babies and the Eighth Doctor went a step further, using them as a distraction whilst battling the Master in San Francisco. Much later, in Mummy on the Orient Express, we saw the Twelfth Doctor carrying jelly babies around in a very fancy case – much smarter than the old paper bag he’s now reverted to! Maybe they’re a Time Lord thing – in The Sound of Drums it was revealed the Master carried a bag of jelly babies around and he even offered one to his wife before tucking into one himself!
The Doctor resists the idea of change and presumably believes this is the final end, declaring that wherever the TARDIS has brought him, he’s staying. The last episode of Evil of the Daleks was broadcast exactly 50 years to the day before The Doctor Falls was first shown. In that early episode, half a century ago, the Doctor’s closing words were, ‘The end. The final end…’
The first actor to play the Doctor, William Hartnell, was known to his friends as Bill. His partner was called Heather. Coincidence?
Regeneration echoes…
Whilst discussing ways in which the Doctor has ‘died’ – in other words, events that have triggered a regeneration – Missy states, ‘I know you’ve fallen.’ She knows because she was there and saw it happen! In Logopolis, whilst derailing the Master’s plan to gain dominion over the entire cosmos, the Fourth Doctor tumbled from a radio telescope. He plummeted to the ground where, moments later, the plunge resulted in his transformation into the Fifth Doctor. So, it’s not only in recent episodes that the Doctor falls!
Logopolis was also the first adventure where the Cloister Bell was heard to chime. It tolls again towards the end of this episode – an ominous sign as the Doctor once described it as, ‘…a sort of communications device reserved for wild catastrophes and sudden calls to man the battle stations!’
Just before it appears the Doctor will regenerate we see a succession of former companions and friends. The Fourth Doctor had similar visions moments before regenerating and back then he too heard them saying his name. It’s worth noting that on that occasion, moments before, he had a flashback of enemies, the first of which was the Master, gloating ‘Predicable as ever, Doctor.’ In The Doctor Falls, his fellow Time Lord isn’t the first face he ‘sees’ but in the succession of flashbacks, Missy’s is the slightly separate, final one.
‘Where there’s tears, there’s hope.’ This comment brings to mind another line spoken in a regeneration episode – the final part of Planet of the Spiders. In that adventure, the frail and damaged Third Doctor sees one of Sarah Jane’s tears as she weeps, thinking he’s about to die. Poignantly, he murmurs, ‘A tear, Sarah Jane? No, don’t cry. While there’s life there’s…’ But he doesn’t have the strength to finish the sentence with the word ‘hope’ and moments later he becomes the Fourth Doctor. In this episode Bill quotes the Twelfth Doctor’s ‘where there’s tears’ line back to him. In Planet of the Spiders, the original line becomes the last thing the Doctor says to his companion whereas in The Doctor Falls it’s the last thing his companion says to him.
‘You may be a Doctor, but I am the Doctor… The original you might say!’ This comment is a mash up of two lines previously spoken by the Time Lord. Shortly after regenerating the Fourth Doctor told Harry, ‘You may be a Doctor, but I am the Doctor. The definite article, you might say!’ And in The Five Doctors, when Tegan asks who the First Doctor ‘might be’ he replies tetchily, ‘I might be any number of things, young lady. As it happens, I am the Doctor. The original, you might say!’
And finally (almost) let’s look at all those references to places and planets mentioned in The Doctor Falls that relate to previous Cyberman stories…
Mondas first appeared in the Cybermen’s debut adventure, The Tenth Planet, where its similarity to our planet was so great, observers could scarcely believe it, initially claiming, ‘There must be some reflection off Earth!’ The Cybermen revealed the name of their home world and one of the humans spluttered, ‘Mondas? But isn't that one of the ancient names of Earth?’ The Cybermen from Mondas, as seen in The Tenth Planet, were strikingly similar to those in The Doctor Falls.
Telos, another planet referenced in The Doctor Falls, has sometimes been called ‘the home of the Cybermen’. This world held a slumbering ‘colony’ of Cybermen which was awoken – and later defeated by the Second Doctor – in The Tomb of the Cybermen.
A more unexpected reference is the Doctor’s mention of Marinus. The planet has only been visited once onscreen, in the fifth ever Doctor Who adventure, 1964’s The Keys of Marinus. Curiously, that story made no mention of the Cybermen. Indeed, the ‘tin men’ from Mondas wouldn’t make their debut until over two years later!
Less is known about Planet 14, another world the Doctor mentions in this episode. Way back in 1968, during The Invasion, the Cyber Planner stated that the Doctor and his companion had ‘…been recognised on Planet 14!’ adding, ‘They are dangerous and must be destroyed!’
In the forest, the Time Lord also namechecks Voga – the so-called ‘Planet of Gold’ where the Fourth Doctor faced the Cybermen in the distant future in Revenge of the Cybermen. In that adventure he defeated his old foes by using gold (which is deadly to some Cybermen) and later, ordering the Vogans to crash a rocket into the Cyber Ship.
Canary Wharf was the London location where the Doctor engineered the defeat of the Daleks and Cybermen when the two sides fought during the events of Army of Ghosts/Doomsday. The Doctor used the ‘void stuff’ (a kind of background radiation) which contaminated the invading Cybermen as a kind of magnet, enabling him to drag them and the Daleks into the void itself. Or, as Mickey Smith put it when summarizing the ingenious plan: ‘So, you’re sending the Daleks and Cybermen to Hell!’
‘Even on the moon…’ In the 1967 story The Moonbase, the Doctor foiled an invasion by organising for the ‘Gravitron’ (a device that manipulated gravity and the weather on Earth) to be activated in such a way as to send the Cybermen helplessly into space. The action of this story took place on the lunar surface in the year 2070.
‘Sontarans! Perverting the course of human history!’ These were almost the first words spoken by the Fourth Doctor, seconds after he regenerated. The Twelfth Doctor has also said them before - immediately after waking up, apparently in a state of confusion, in Listen.
The words, ‘when the Doctor was me’ are a fragment of the last thing the Eleventh Doctor ever said to Clara. Aboard the TARDIS, about to become the Twelfth Doctor, he promised his ‘Impossible Girl’, ‘I will not forget one line of this. Not one day. I swear, I will always remember when the Doctor was me.’
‘I don’t want to go…’ These were the final words, spoken sorrowfully by the Tenth Doctor before he regenerated. They were also the last comment he made to the Eleventh Doctor before leaving him in The Day of the Doctor and coincidentally, David Bradley, playing William Hartnell in An Adventure in Space and Time, utters the line when his character is contemplating stepping away from Doctor Who, which in the show itself, resulted in the very first regeneration.
And finally…
David Bradley has appeared in Doctor Who before, playing the sinister Solomon in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. He also provided the voice of the Shansheeth in The Sarah Jane Adventures story which featured the Eleventh Doctor and Jo Jones (nee Grant) – The Death of the Doctor. But in the world of Doctor Who he’s better known for his peerless portrayal of William Hartnell. Here he plays the First Doctor, complete with the character’s familiar cloak, hat and habit of gripping his lapels. But where in his timeline do we join him and what will happen when these two Doctors collide? Find out in this year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special!
