The Power of Fan Service

Review of The Power of the Doctor
Warning: This review may contain episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

There was nothing subtle about The Power of the Doctor. It was pure fan service, from start to finish. Some of it we knew about beforehand, and some of it came as a surprise—again and again—but it was blatantly obvious that showrunner Chris Chibnall wanted to check off every single item on his bucket list on the way out.

For the most part, I was happy to go along for the ride. Only in the final thirty seconds or so did I balk. (Yes, we’ll talk about that more, but under the cut.) It made me want to use my full-on Mom Voice: I’m not upset with you; just disappointed.

But let’s back up for a while, and leave that moment for later. First, let’s talk about the bonkers hour-and-a-half of Jodie Whittaker’s last episode in the lead role. This was Chris Chibnall’s ultimate fanfic moment; he threw in every plot thread and character he could think of (and book), and wrote a huge fix-it fic.

For those who may not be familiar with fanfic (I am only peripherally so, as I don’t read fic myself, though my kids do), the biggest purpose of the genre—as far as I can tell—is to tell the stories with beloved characters that the fan writer really wanted to see/read in the original media property, but was never given. (In other words, all of modern Who is basically fanfic of Classic Who, show-run by Classic fans.) And one sub-genre of fanfic is the “fix-it fic,” in which the fan writer fixes something that they felt was inherently wrong with the original.

That’s why Chibnall gave us things like Tegan’s moment with her Doctor, in which she got confirmation that she—and Adric—were never actually forgotten, and Ace’s moment with her Doctor, in which they were able to patch up their relationship. He gave us Yaz holding the Doctor in a “bridal carry.” He gave us Ace’s unconcealed appreciation for the Doctor’s latest incarnation (“That is a good look on you, Professor”), which is the closest we’ve ever come to an on-sreen acknowledgment of Ace’s orientation.

And he gave us the previous Doctors—Davison, C. Baker, McCoy, and McGann (along with Bradley)—in an actual, honest-to-goodness episode, complete with new inter-Doctor snark (“There’s always one that has to be different.” / “I am a manifestation of our consciousness. I can wear what I like.” / ~eyeroll~). Those were all fixes I was delighted to see on screen.

He didn’t skimp on callbacks, either. The Master alone was dripping with them. Sacha Dhawan’s incarnation—less over-the-top nuts, and more nefariously scheming this time around—has the menacing glare down pat, and used it to great effect. But I just about choked with laughter when, after asking the Doctor if she liked his garb, he declared that one has “got to dress for the occasion.”

Then we get to forced regeneration. “They even did it to you once, didn’t they?” the Master taunts her, referring to the change from Troughton’s incarnation to Pertwee’s. “Well, maybe more than once,” he continues. “Who knows? Not you,” he says, reminding the audience that if we can have Ruth, the Fugitive Doctor (how great to see her again, too!), there are any number of unknown incarnations out there.

And that’s pretty much what the whole episode entailed: reminders of things we’ve discovered, known, and loved about this show over the past nearly sixty years of its existence. We got old school references like “the Master’s Dalek Plan”; Ace with her jacket, Nitro 9, and knowledge of the Cybermen’s one-time weakness against gold; Tegan’s brash personality, favorite epithet “rabbits,” and experience as an air hostess in the 1980s; and the TARDIS’s tendency to drop the Doctor’s friends off “close enough” in Croydon. We also got modern-era callbacks like the Cyberium; psychic paper; and characters Kate, Vinder, and Graham. We even got the Doctor’s friends arrayed around the TARDIS console like in Journey’s End.

With all these little details to delight our fannish hearts, though, Chibnall didn’t fail to leave a breadcrumb for the future, either. In one of the Master’s last significant moments on screen, his agonized exclamation left plenty for fans to chew on: “I raised your daughter. Don’t let me go back to being me.” There are probably already dozens of theories about exactly what he meant. [Alternatively: the captions on the version I watched were completely, utterly wrong]

Given all of these wonderful little moments, I guess I can forgive a couple of things I didn’t care for. First and foremost, the frankly unsurprising (if eye-rollingly irritating) re-appearance of Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor (yes, that’s been confirmed; thanks, I hate it) put a huge damper on the episode for me. I know there are hard-core Tennant stans who have been campaigning for this for years, so I’m hoping this will shut them all up, and we can have nice things again after a one-off Tennant appearance in the 60th anniversary special.

Then there was the conclusion to the Cybermen/Rasputin and Dalek/volcanoes conundrum. Honestly, freezing volcanic eruptions into steel is pretty dumb (“public art”? really??), but whatever. At that point, we just needed a quick fix to end the nominal end-of-the-world threat so we could get on with the good stuff.

But that’s my whole point: I actively don’t want to look for plot holes. They don’t matter to me here, given everything else I got out of the episode. I know the plot issues were there; I don’t care. Because that’s the power of fan service.