So, there was no grand trap set by the Toymaker as I’d largely expected. The Doctor regenerated into a slightly more weathered variant of his tenth persona (war, fugitive and Morbius Doctors notwithstanding) because he needed to find Donna, restore her memory, and rest. Yet at the same time, Russell T Davies makes the Toymaker hugely significant on a cosmological level. The Toymaker has defeated the Guardians and turned them into voodoo dolls, played against God and turned him into a Jack-in-the-box. If he’s turned the Doctor’s history into a jigsaw puzzle, then not only is it one with missing pieces (blame the Toymaker for those gaps in the 16mm telerecordings of the 1960s) it’s one where other pieces could be in the wrong place and recoloured by an idle child, like a reinvented suit and accompanying long coat, perhaps.
For someone seemingly independent of time, the Toymaker is nonetheless trapped by it. He is an unapologetic discriminator against people by colour, a racist of the late imperial British twentieth century, who deploys accents like a believer in national characteristics. He’s attached to the idea that balls represent human heads, a notion emerging from European imperialist studies of the cultures of conquered societies they thought more primitive than their own. On the one hand this grisly allusion makes rugby-sceptics like the boy Russell T Davies and the boy Matthew Kilburn feel justified in wanting nothing to do with a culturally pervasive sport which seemed to have little good to say about humanity. Their adult selves might be more open-minded. Nevertheless, from this point of view, when the Doctors and the Toymaker play catch, they are playing with the thoughts, the will of humanity; the Toymaker loses his grip because of his smallness, because he can only see the aspects of humanity which fit his game-picture.
The great twist to Doctor Who mythology introduced in The Giggle was bi-generation, enabling Ncuti Gatwa to make his debut alongside David Tennant and participate in the Toymaker’s defeat. It enabled lots of tidying-up to be done before the fifteenth Doctor’s first episode proper; we’ve already managed the post-transformation recovery and the new Doctor was also in no hurry to get dressed, so the costume trying-on could be skipped. Allowing the fourteenth Doctor to become a retired Doctor, resting so that his successor could travel time and space as unencumbered as possible by past trauma, was played in a dramatically satisfying way, but I’m not sure what precedent this sets for the future, or how David Tennant’s Doctor’s existence is now defined. I expect we will see him and Donna again, perhaps at the twentieth anniversary of The Runaway Bride. As for Russell’s idea of retroactive bi-generation, I imagine the third Doctor waking up contemporaneously with the split between Doctors fourteen and fifteen, finding that the former UNIT HQ is now a luxury hotel and spa, and spending his retirement consuming cheese and wine, and practising Venusian aikido on his personal trainer. Otherwise, this jury is still out on the extended implications.
Other notes would include how appropriate Spice Up Your Life is as a theme for the Toymaker. I remember one Conservative MP was convinced that the Spice Girls were called the Slice Girls and there is something viciously bullying about this song among others: you will have fun, but on our terms, they say, and this is much the Toymaker’s mantra. There’s potentially enough story in The Giggle to fill twice the length; it feels like a very compressed feature film. Some elements – the return of Melanie, the Vlinx – are set-up for future development when Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor teams up with UNIT; for the moment we can take them for granted. Melanie’s musical expertise seems complementary to her mathematical and computational background. Despite knowing that the UNIT helipad is really a platform built on a car park, I believed in its vertiginous reality and felt the dizzying pull of its edge; but who was bold enough to collect the gold tooth containing the Master, seemingly hovering over thin air? Amidst its through line taking the fourteenth Doctor to retirement with Donna, The Giggle trails unanswered questions in its wake.
Matthew Kilburn 