Bernice Summerfield isn’t quite retired. She’s not in her golden years. She has enough holographic cats. She definitely isn’t dating the handsome stranger who keeps showing up to her lectures. She’s not in danger. Dark Gallifrey isn’t rising.

There are three ways to look at this story; as part of a larger arc, as a character study, and as an examination of the core ideas of Doctor Who. As a story, oddly, it’s at its least successful. This is a second part which feels very much like a second part. Bernice’s job is to get Captain John and the War Master from A to B. We’re back on Dark Gallifrey by the end and the stage is set for the third part. It’s never less than entertaining but it’s often frustrating precisely because it seems to do very little but move the characters from point A to point B.

As a character study it’s infinitely more interesting and successful. James Goss’ script has the courage to examine the one thing that Doctor Who fandom often seems terrified of: the passage of time. Lisa Bowerman, always excellent, is especially great here as a calmer, older and charmingly slightly grumpy Bernice. Bowerman is exceptionally emotionally honest as a performer and the fragility, and awareness she brings to this story is especially successful.

She’s also the lens through which we see the other two leads, and see different sides of them. Captain John in particular blooms here, and James Marsters is tremendous as a more puppyish murder enthusiast than we’ve seen before. John is sincerely very sweet at times here and Bernice calls him out on that and he’s… pretty much okay with it. That gives us an angle we’ve not seen before, and I’m very interested to see how the third part digs into this. There’s a really charming element to this too, with John and the War Master sparking off each other in the same way that Marsters talks about working with Derek Jacobi in the interview section. Two nuanced, complicated villains having fun trying to kill each other and more fun realizing they have someone to play with.

That brings us to Jacobi, who is typically superb and treads similar ground to Marsters. The War Master spends much of this story as the Provost of Bernice’s university, and has rather more fun being a nice, old academic than he wants to admit. There’s a moment where another character tells him he’s pretending to be the Doctor and it’s the nastiest, and most admiring, barb in a script full of them. An elder villain rather better at being nice than he wants to admit. A younger villain with a heart of gold that may actually be his. A legendary archaeologist, worried that her storied life is a story no one wants to hear. All of them challenged and challenging each other. All of them orbiting Dark Gallifrey.

That brings us to the central questions of Doctor Who, for good and ill. The story deals with time, and the passage of time, with impressive perception and wit and in doing so makes David Warner’s Doctor, cameoing here, one of the most impressive and fundamentally Doctor-like incarnations of the character. The complexity of the three characters reflects this too, as does the sense of depth to the world brought by the excellent supporting cast, especially the returning Peterside.

The problem is also fundamentally a Doctor Who concept. We’re five parts into Dark Gallifrey now and we have the tiniest idea of what it is and why it matters. The personal stakes here are intense and well realized. The narrative stakes are more nebulous and ill defined than I’d like, doubly so given the fact this is the second part of three.

Verdict: This is complex, thematically chewy, brilliantly acted work but the core of the story remains frustratingly obtuse. Hopefully that will change next time. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart

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