YMMV / Doctor Who S36 E11 "World Enough and Time"

• Alternate Character Interpretation: In the week between this episode's debut and that of "The Doctor Falls" there were fans wondering if the Saxon Master actually came to care for Bill over the time she knew him as Mr. Razor, which "The Doctor Falls" reveals to have been ten years, and regretted having to sacrifice her to his plot to both assist in the creation of the Cybermen and stop Missy's Heel–Face Turn. However, "The Doctor Falls" has the Master telling the Doctor that he hated having to cozy up to her all that time and he treats Cyber-Bill with the most cruelty of any of the characters, not even referring to her as a she but an it.
• Broken Base:
  • Being a "Genesis of the Cybermen" story rife with Medical Horror surrounding the original Cybermen, this story can't help but draw comparisons to "Spare Parts" and spark arguments over which of the two is the better origin story. Particularly, the Cybermen being created on a colony ship that came from Mondas is somewhat at odds with past tellings of their origins, which claimed they were made on the dying planet itself.^* It also calls into question their plan to revitalize Mondas in "The Tenth Planet" if they seemingly left it for dead here. It should be noted that the episode itself goes out of its way to avoid contradicting "Spare Parts", instead acknowledging it and every other Cyberman origin story as equally "true", by having the Doctor commenting on how these new Cybermen are a parallel evolution of the race that developed away from other branches, just like on Mondas, Telos, Earth, Marinus and Planet 14.
  • In the week between this and "The Doctor Falls", the question of whether Bill Potts should live or die was a hot topic in fandom since she was now a full-fledged Cyberman, a condition that the Doctor has never been able to reverse. On one side were fans who wanted the revival to see her situation through to the logical bitter end and finally kill off a long-term companion for good. On the other were those who wanted a bittersweet-but-triumphant ending to her story instead of an undeserved, senseless demise that would be a retread of Danny Pink's in Series 8 and strip her of her agency just to be another tragedy for the Doctor to brood over — one rife with ugly implications to boot, since it would be a black, working class lesbian dying to further the character development of a white, male Time Lord. In the end, she managed to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence thanks to Heather's return, so the latter group "won".
  • There is some debate over whether the tragedies of this episode should be placed squarely on the Twelfth Doctor's shoulders to the point that, as argued in this two-part essay, he "deserves to die" and regenerate for his failure to keep her safe, reflecting his general failure to see the context of situations when he argues for his moral code over the course of his tenure (ala the Tenth Doctor's failures in "The Waters of Mars" and "The End of Time"). He's the one who convinces Bill to participate in a dangerous gambit to prove Missy's capability for goodness (and by extension his own capacity for same). He then tries but fails to keep Bill from being shot, and from there doesn't think to board the lifts with her and the Proto-Cybermen instead of trusting them, or at least wait to explain Time Dilation until he boards the returned lift. However, putting all responsibility on his shoulders requires one to disregard Bill and Jorj's choices, and due to the Saxon!Master already being on the other end of the ship, things could have been even worse if he'd managed to board the lifts with Bill.
• Character Rerailment: Boy is it ever! The YMMV part comes from the portrayal of the Cybermen in this episode: besides the outpatients that aren't fully converted, only one Cyberman appears in this episode. Much like "Dalek" before it, the episode is a tour de force study in the relevance of who the Cybermen are. While the aspect of losing your humanity and the horror it brings has been explored in the new series before, it's given new relevance by adding a human element to the other side of the equation; now that we've placed the last survivors of a slowly dying out human race in a doomed world with a slow, inescapable death they have two-fold reasons to save themselves: to save themselves from the pain of having their bodies fail while they live by breathing exhaust fumes and to create a better world for future generations. The problem is that once they get into that mindset, becoming a Cyberman "is" the better world for future generations to their point of view. This horrifying debate is at the heart of the cybermen in classic stories like "Spare Parts" and "The Tenth Planet", and arguably one of the best portrayals the show could possibly do for them.
• Continuity Lockout: On the one hand, this two-parter demands not only familiarity with revival series Cybermen and Master episodes going back to 2006's "Rise of the Cybermen", but draws upon a storyline and characters from fifty-one years ago ("The Tenth Planet"). Even worse, only three of that serial's four episodes have survived, so anyone born since then is out of luck. On the other hand, much of this story is devoted to revealing the Mondasian Cybermen Backstory by way of reintroducing these particular villains.
• Critical Dissonance: One of the most highly-regarded episodes of the Twelfth Doctor era by both critics and fans... was also one of the lowest-rated of the entire revival in the U.K., following on from several weeks of ratings lows.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: At the beginning of the episode, Missy pretends to be the Doctor. Fast-forward several weeks later, and Jodie Whittaker was announced to be playing the Thirteenth Doctor, who will be the first female Doctor.
• I Knew It!:
  • Some fans figured Moffat would kill off Bill because he was about to leave the show and would likely sweep the chessboard clean for Chris Chibnall. That, and they know what to expect with Moffat by this point, and it made sense he would have one last crack at killing off a beloved character... though from there other fans correctly guessed that there would be more to Bill's fate than the Cliffhanger teased!
  • Because of the fake-out regeneration in "The Lie of the Land", when the Doctor appeared to be dying in the opening sequence, a lot of people expected another tease of a regeneration, only for real this time.
• Like You Would Really Do It:
  • Steven Moffat's Radio Times synopsis noted that "the Doctor witnesses the death of someone he has pledged to protect" in this episode, and it turns out to be Bill Potts by way of a shooting, which she actually survives — it's just that she ends up fully Cyber-converted. Many fans put on their best mourning for her seemingly-inevitable death after that, but there was a lot arguing that "The Doctor Falls" would still give her a Bittersweet Ending. As the Radio Times pointed out a few days prior to broadcast, the prospect of Bill being Killed Off for Real was constantly foreshadowed and teased both in and out of show... just like it was for Rose Tyler, Donna Noble, Amy and Rory Pond, Clara Oswald, and even the Eleventh Doctor himself; and even in Clara's case, who actually was Killed Off for Real, she got "wiggle room" after that. And indeed, Bill got her own kind of wiggle room.
  • The possibility that the Twelfth Doctor wouldn't get a heartfelt sendoff in the annual Christmas Episode as his two predecessors did — instead he'd get a Downer Ending of Dying Alone, apparently in the wake of My Greatest Failure — was teased by the cold open. But especially after the instantly-notorious regeneration fakeout of "The Lie of the Land" three episodes prior, a fair deal of fans suspected he'd be able to "pause" his regeneration at the end of "The Doctor Falls", especially with Steven Moffat and Peter Capaldi both saying that the process wouldn't be a retread of what Ten and Eleven went through, and the former saying that the Christmas show picks up directly where that episode leaves off via a twist ending. And indeed he did.
• Shocking Moments:
  • Absolutely no one expected the opening scene to show a Flash Forward of the Twelfth Doctor regenerating (for real, this time), as many thought they would have to wait until 2017's Christmas special to see that. As it turned out, they still did since "The Doctor Falls" ends Once More, with Clarity by revealing he puts it off long enough for the Christmas special to unfold.
  • The fact that the Simm!Master was Mr. Razor.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: One of the defining features of the Mondasian Cybermen were their distinctly human hands, so the replacement of those with skin-colored gloves hasn't sat well with some people. Even Peter Capaldi didn't like this change! But he accepted the Rule of Drama justification: If the Doctor looked at the Cyberman's hands and saw they were slim, black, and female, he wouldn't have had to ask the cyborg the whereabouts of Bill Potts!
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A full run through of an episode of Missy acting as The Doctor would have been great, instead it's quickly subsumed into the Potts/Cyberman plot.
• Win Back the Crowd: After the Monks Trilogy fizzled out and "Empress of Mars" and "The Eaters of Light" were seen as improvements but also got a lot of So Okay, It's Average reactions, this one (especially for viewers who hadn't been spoiled by the advertising) won back the fanbase in a big way for being the best and scariest use of the Cybermen in the revival series — if not the series as a whole — and ending on a whopper of a Cliffhanger. With only two episodes to go for the Twelfth Doctor era, there were arguments being made that even if "The Doctor Falls" dropped the ball, this would go down as one of its finest episodes, much the way "Heaven Sent" is often viewed as a standalone story rather than the midpoint of a controversial three-parter. The good news was that "The Doctor Falls" was also, by and large, seen as a worthy followup.

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