Doctor Who: Spyfall, series 12 episode 2 recap: the Doctor vs the Master – with a little help from a war hero and Ada Lovelace
It was The Doctor versus the Master as the two-part alien spy thriller reached its century-hopping, mind-bending conclusion. Here's what happened in part two of Spyfall.
Plane crash was averted Blink-style
We left them on a New Year’s Day cliffhanger, with the Doctor’s “fam” of three companions – Graham (Bradley Walsh), Ryan (Tosin Cole) and Yaz (Mandip Gill) – stranded on a cockpit-less plane, careering out of control at 30,000ft. Could they escape certain death? Of course they could, albeit via surprising means.
Ryan found personalised instructions on “How to fly a plane without a cockpit”, while the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) magically popped up on the cabin screens with further advice (shades of David Tennant-era episode Blink). With the aid of a mobile phone app, Ryan managed to return the craft to its pre-programmed flight path.
How had the Doc pulled off such a miracle? With time travel, naturally. We later saw how she’d hopped back to add helpful plaques while the plane was being built, pre-recorded the video and laminated those instructions (“I love a laminator!”). Slight swizz but a fun one.
Stranded Doctor found an unlikely ally
“Alone in the unknown, all hope lost.” The Doctor had been sent to the same nightmarish forest realm as Yaz during the last episode and was talking to herself to check she wasn’t dead.
Fortuitously, she chanced upon bonnet-clad Victorian lady Ada Gordon (Cold Feet’s Sylvie Briggs), who was regularly marooned here during mysterious bouts of paralysis. She held the Doctor’s hand and together they were propelled back to Ada’s world – specifically, The Royal Gallery of Practical Science in London’s Adelaide Street circa 1834, where inventors were exhibiting steam guns and diving bells.
The top-hatted Master (scenery-chewing Sacha Dhawan) soon arrived in pursuit of his old frenemy, zapping bystanders with his trademark “tissue compression eliminator”. Killing, he cackled, “gives me a little buzz, right here in the hearts”. When plucky Ada turned guns and grenades on the Master, she and the Doctor managed to escape to the house of helpful Mr Babbage (Mark Dexter, who recently played Tony Benn in The Crown).
It dawned on the Doctor who her new allies were: polymath Charles Babbage, credited with inventing the first mechanical computer in his Difference Engine; and the mathematician daughter of poet Lord Byron, who’d later become Ada Lovelace and be hailed as the first computer programmer after writing algorithms for Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
The Doctor tried to beam back to the 21st century – except new pal Ada mischievously took her hand and went with her.
Three villains had joined evil forces
The Doctor’s fellow Time Lord and arch nemesis the Master, regenerated as a crazed, camp psychopath, was in league with tech billionaire Daniel Barton (Lenny Henry) and those mysterious glowing figures, who he revealed were called The Kasavin – only he couldn’t control them and didn’t fully trust them either.
Their uneasy plan involved silver lady statuettes and sleeper agents embedded throughout time and space, partly enabled by the Master’s own Tardis – still disguised as MI6 agent O’s shack in the Australian outback, tumbling through the vortex like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz.
He’d hijacked their MI6 car last time out and assassinated spymaster C (Stephen Fry) with a laser rifle. Dhawan’s mercurial, giggling portrayal resembled Andrew Scott as Sherlock’s Moriarty – and, indeed, Andrew Scott as Fleabag’s Hot Priest when he ordered the Doctor to “Kneel!”
How the BBC managed to keep Dhawan’s role secret in this age of social media leaks was impressive and involved slyly airbrushing him out of trailers. The Master himself would approve of such cunning.
Fugitive fam fought against tech fiend
Having landed at Barton’s private airfield in Essex (“This is my manor! We’re golden!” declared Graham delightedly), the companions found themselves tracked via their phones, so smashed them and went off-grid in scenes that recalled the reality chase series Hunted.
They’d surreptitiously kept some of the spy gadgetry issued by MI6 and Graham used his “laser shoes” to fight off Barton’s goons and steal their car. They ran around like headless chickens but it was still refreshing to see the trio strike out on their own, rather than relegated to damsel-in-distress duties.
Wartime caper hailed another unsung heroine
They were heading in the right direction historically. Just not far enough. The Doctor and Ada landed in Nazi-occupied Paris during a 1943 bombing raid. Once again, the Master was on their tail, now masquerading as an SS officer (“A low, even for him,” muttered the Doctor) but our heroic duo were offered refuge by a French resistance agent.
When the pair hid beneath her floorboards alongside radio equipment, the Doctor realised this was Noor Inayat Khan (Belgian-Rwandan actress Aurora Marion), code-named “Madeleine" – the first female wireless operator to be sent behind enemy lines and Britain’s first Muslim war heroine.
As the Doctor helpfully summarised: “Two pacifists and a 19th century descendant of Byron, fighting the Nazis in Paris and an alien invasion across multiple dimensions. That’s a big to-do list.”
She used Noor’s transmitter to send a Morse code-style message to the Master, arranging a rendezvous up the Eiffel Tower. In the ensuing confrontation, there was a neat callback to 1981 adventure Logopolis, when the Master made his foe fall from Jodrell Bank telescope, causing Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor to regenerate into Peter Davidson’s Fifth.
Now the Doctor got belated revenge. Noor sent a fake message back to London, intending for it to be intercepted, outing the Master as a valuable British asset spying on the Nazis. The Doctor even jammed his psychic facial perception filter so the Germans could see exactly how non-Aryan he was. The Master was duly arrested at gunpoint. For him, ze war was over.
Deadly alliance planned to turn humans into data storage
So what was this planet-threatening conspiracy between the Kasavin and a pair of megalomaniacs? As search engine oligarch Barton revealed in his big keynote speech, it involved repurposing humanity as glorified hard drives. Colluding with the Kasavin, he beamed alien energy through devices worldwide, fusing them to their users, erasing their DNA and reformatting it as data storage.
Writer Chris Chibnall’s zeitgeisty anti-surveillance tub-thumbing was hardly subtle – Barton was a man who would literally kill his own mother, said “Trust me, I never use Facebook unless forced” and spelt out the dangers of data protection – but it certainly wouldn’t do younger viewers any harm to be reminded of the power we’ve willingly handed over to tech giants.
The Doctor saved the day and defeated the Master – of course
“She is wise and unafraid,” as Ada told Noor. “I believe in her.” The Doctor repaid their faith by stealing the Master’s Tardis and using it against him.
A temporal map inside showed how the Kasavin had been spying on every significant figure in the development of computers throughout history. Realising that the silver lady devices, present in both Babbage’s study and Barton’s office, were key to the alien plan, she went back in time and embedded a failsafe: a virus which would shutdown if it detected the amassing of an army.
The Master emerged, presumably having survived his Nazi arrest, and lived through the past 77 years like a mere mortal, just in time to see his old foe foil his scheme. What’s more, the Doctor had secretly recorded his plan to let Barton and the Kasavin do the dirty work of destroying the human race, then get rid of them too.
She revealed his betrayal to the creatures before exiling them back to their own dimension – and they took the treacherous Master with them. He was last seen stranded in the dark place with a despairing scream of “Doctaaaaah!”. Yet it wasn’t the last we saw of the renegade Time Lord.
Gallifrey carnage could become this series' arc
After returning her historic friends to 1843 and 1945 respectively, the Doctor took a solo trip to Gallifrey. She’d been goaded to do so by the Master, who said their home planet had been “pulverised, nuked, razed to the ground” with “everyone killed”.
As the Doctor gazed in horror upon the smouldering landscape, a geo-activated holographic message appeared, with the Master confessing it was him who’d destroyed Gallifrey after “discovering what they did”, claiming “the entire existence of our species was built on the lie of the Timeless Child”.
This harked back to Whittaker’s second episode in autumn 2018, The Ghost Monument, when clairvoyant rag-like monsters The Remnants hinted at a dark secret from the Doctor’s past: “We see further back, what’s hidden, even from yourself. The Timeless Child, the outcast, abandoned and unknown.” As the Doctor briefly flashed back and her face hardened with resolve, this mystery looks set to become an overarching theme in the vein of “Bad Wolf” or “The Impossible Girl”.
Was the second episode a success?
Largely, yes. With its multiple time periods and barrelling momentum, it was a rip-roaring adventure, pacily directed by Lee Haven Jones. Part one of Spyfall sagged in places, but this was better. The second series of showrunner Chibnall’s reign already feels more assured than the lacklustre 2018 series.
Admittedly, the silhouetted white monsters didn’t scare and lapses in logic meant the alien scheme didn’t convince but it was ever thus with Doctor Who’s more breakneck plots. The thrill was in the rollicking ride.
Besides, the historical cameos were hugely enjoyable (what chance of an Ada and Noor spin-off some day?) and hints at a darker dimension to the hyperactively upbeat 13th Doctor were promising.
Green-haired Inbetweener next time
Next Sunday, the Doctor decides Team Tardis need a holiday, so takes them to a luxury resort called Tranquility Spa –which, naturally, turns out to be hiding deadly secrets. Guest stars are Scottish actress Laura Fraser and James “Jay from The Inbetweeners” Buckley. See you next weekend to discuss whether he’s “fwend” or foe.
