Since I'll be working later, let's get in on the #doctorwhoday watchalong now!

The purple lighting from the portal is very flattering on Dhawan.

Timeless Children wastes no time splitting itself into two separate threads, both of which entirely made of exclamation marks. The Doctor and Master in the ruins of Gallifrey! The companions fighting an army of Cybermen!

It manages to pull off both in epic scale. Great direction

The guest cast are patchily developed, but they're good actors. I love how the camera captures their horrified faces as the cybermen pick them off.

I love Ko Sharmus, though. "You can be a pacifist tomorrow." He's one of the biggest threats to the ethics of 13's era, and a hero

That's such a cartoonish joy to Dhawan deciding to phone up the episode's other villain for a team-up. While insulting Ashad's look. Dhawan's Master does campy evil well.

"It's red with the blood of our people!" *little giggle*

This Master is such a little shit. He doesn't even have original jokes, he doesn't have much to live for, but he still delights in being a prick.

"Set course for Gallifrey!" say the Cybermen! God, to watch this as a kid. I'd wet myself.

The Timeless Children is all exclamation points, fast, short scenes, and then suddenly you hit that Graham/Yaz pep talk, and it breathes. It lands. I don't know if Chibnall always integrates these emotional scenes into the action well, but he nails it here. Plus, Bradley Walsh.

I wasn't fond of Dhawan's performance in Spyfall, but he's very good in Timeless Children. There's more of a lid on his rage and pain. Spyfall was him acting out to get the Doctor's attention and it was all a bit much, here he's a simmering volcano of bitterness.

The Timeless Children really deserves to be watched on a good TV. It's possibly the most cinematic the show's ever looked, more visually spectacular than several recent blockbusters I could think of. Incredible job by the production crew.

The Tecteun exposition dump is so Broadchurch. That's how Chibnall structures a series, raise questions and then dump the answers in a monologue in the finale... the rest of which is filled by everyone reeling at the unearthed trauma.

It's also a far shorter and more efficient monologue than I remembered. It's still a big block of narration, but not as big as my memory said, and immediately followed by a big giggly cybermen fight to keep the excitement up.

Ryan's joy at the basketball bomb is wonderful. Great beat. Little, silly, petty moments like that go a long way to selling a more serious and convoluted drama.

Both the actors for Tecteun and for the child get more desperate and horror-y over the course of the experimentation monologue. It's definitely sold as a fucked up moment.

The Gallifrey citadel building time-lapse is SEXY

So, is what we see of Brendan in Ascension of the Cybermen the Doctor's dreams of him, or is it the role of the Master in that episode, viewing the footage in the Matrix? Because there's no time in that episode for the Doctor to dream...

RYAN: Hey, you ever think of doors? Big lockable doors. Indestructible doors.
KO SHARMUS: Dream of them every night.

Legit good banter

Amazing that Sacha Dhawan is asked to emote to a fucking cybermen action figure he's holding after killing Ashad. And there's not even many cuts in that scene, he's just going for it. Must have been a fun day on set.

The Master is obsessed with the idea of being special in The Timeless Children. He kills Ashad for failing to be special, and he envies the Doctor for her heritage. If the Master had found out he was the Timeless Child, he'd have been fucking stoked.

I love that the Doctor PHYSICALLY ATTACKS the Master to demand to know more about her past. It's nice to finally see 13, the most level and confident of the Doctors, face a genuine threat to her morals and identity. Timeless Children as an episode is all about that breaking point

The Cybermasters are awesome, as is the mashup of motifs that Akinola brings out with their introduction. Such a fun moment.

"Step into the unknown, who fancies going first?"
*cut to Yaz, already halfway there and walking at speed*

"I don't have those answers. But say I did, would they even help?"
"Of course they would. All this, it means I'm not who I thought I was."
"Because your memories aren't compatible with what you learnt today."
"Yes."
"Have you ever been limited by who you were before?"

It's a huge repressed trauma mood

"Doctor, we're here for you."

The Fam turn up after the Doctor has a vision of her trauma to give her support. It's sort of the last act of Can You Hear Me?

The Doctor plans to sacrifice herself to kill the Master and the Cybermen with the Death Particle. We've had dilemmas over whether she should kill before, and this is Chibnall's go.

I genuinely wonder if she's glad she'd die in the process, as she sacrifices her values/identity

But ultimately, the Doctor doesn't have to violate who she is to be the hero. "Coward, any day." And now, again, she finds a way to own herself, regardless of the past.

"You think you've broken me? You'll have to try harder than that."

Whatever's past or now, she's the Doctor.

"Come on, come on! What have you got left anyway? You don't even know your own life. Look how low I have brought you. I have won, Doctor. You may have made me, but I have destroyed you. Become death. Become me."

Never gonna happen. Because she's got friends and her own self.

Love Ko Sharmus claiming accountability and doing the penance himself. Really good minor character arc.

"My journey ends here. But the universe still needs you, so I suggest you run. Run, Doctor!"

Yeah, I still love the running.

Tree and house TARDISes

The Judoon making the Doctor's TARDIS flash red and blue with police lights fucking kills me

Timeless Children grows on me every time I watch it. It's a lot to digest, but not only does it work as Chibnall's statement of his Who vision, it shows how much he's engaged with and responding to the show's past, classic and both modern eras. It's a tight thematic dialogue.

It's a great response to episodes like The Parting of the Ways and Day of the Doctor, reinforcing their morality and exploring how that identity can be reformed after trauma. As someone who latched onto those episodes and others like them to build my own identity, it means a lot.

It's by far the most interesting the Thirteenth Doctor as a character has ever been, and it's paired with the most gleeful rummaging through the continuity toybox this era's yet done. I can't not love it.

Also, anyone who complains about it being mostly exposition dump monologues has not watched it recently, because there's only two, they're short, and it's just second act material.