Well… that was certainly a thing! “The Giggle” is the last of the three 60th Anniversary specials and acts as the Fourteenth Doctor’s regeneration story… sort of? It’s hard to get into that bit until the spoilers section (it being partially featured on the next time trailer at least means mentioning it isn’t spoilery!) but even beyond that it was a pretty bonkers story from start to finish, so let’s take a look!
The Giggle starts with a scene in the mid-20s (1920s…) where we see the no-longer-celestial Toymaker (Neil Patrick Harris) running a shop and selling a man called Charles (Charlie De Melo) a ventriloquist doll, the same one that ends up being the first thing filmed on TV by John Logie Baird (played briefly by John MacKay). After the opening it then picks up right from where the last episode ended (minus any shot of Wilf’s face due to Bernard Cribbins being sadly too ill to film the pick up…) with The Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna (Catherine Tate) try to make sense of literally everyone in the immediate area going crazy and/or violent. They’re picked up by UNIT, who now have the Avengers Tower for themselves in the middle of London somehow and it’s here where Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) informs the duo that it’s the whole world who have gone crazy. Now I have to point out that the craziness is a as-subtle-as-a-brick-to-the-face bit of social commentary on the people who are overly opinionated and generally nasty on social media as well as the general addiction to phones and tablets in this day and age. Once again I’m sure there is a more subtle and interesting way to do it rather than spelling it out so obviously, but hey-ho.
The Toymaker plays with his balls…. God that was a low-brow gag, sorry…
We’re introduced to the new UNIT team of previously seen scientific advisor Shirley Bingham (Ruth Madeley), an unexplained robot called “The Vlinx” (voiced by Nicholas Briggs) and Mel (Bonnie Langford) of all people, who apparently returned from her travels in space to 2020s Earth and became a member of UNIT. Well, alright then I guess! The team suss out that the signal driving people mad (a recording of a giggle) has been implanted in all screens since the beginning of television so The Doctor and Donna head back to that exact time and meet The Toymaker face-to-face. I have to say that I’m not sure how to take Neil Patrick Harris’ Toymaker, the weird over-the-top stereotypical accents, the weird love of dancing, and 90s pop music dance sequence (yeah, that was a thing later in the episode…) it’s over-the-top and campy and he pulls it off flawlessly but I’m not sure the Toymaker needed the RTD Master makeover. Well, either way The Doctor and Donna get pulled into the Toymaker’s domain and have to deal with endless corridors, spooky dolls and a puppet performance where Russell T. Davies seemingly wanted to rag on how Steven Moffat wrote out all of his companions (Seriously, Amy, Clara and Bill’s fates of “not killed off but may as well be” were pointed out one by one and ended with a “oh well that’s alright then!” every time The Doctor tried to defend their fates. Very odd! … Very funny though!) Oh and apparently the Toymaker defeated The Master and imprisoned him within his gold tooth…?
I’m not imagining it, am I? That’s almost literally the Avengers Tower…
Eventually The Doctor and the Toymaker face off in a game of high-low and The Doctor loses, but our titular Time Lord points out that after their first face off (and only other face-off, apparently. There goes more expanded media continuity!) this means they’re tied 1-to-1 and everyone always plays best of three. The Toymaker agrees and heads off to 2023 UNIT HQ, where The Doctor and Donna soon arrive as well. After the already mentioned dance sequence the Toymaker takes control of a massive laser gun UNIT has on their helipad and shoots The Doctor through the chest, starting off his regeneration…
It’s not a story that has any intention of slowing down, that’s for sure, and I like that the Toymaker’s powers aren’t explained away by science and instead kept as “he’s from another dimension where our rules don’t apply so he can do anything he wants”. The biggest talking point thought is in the spoiler section!
The Continuity:
Who would’ve thought the 60th Anniversary celebrations would include these two in a scene?
Obviously the big one is the Celestial Toymaker, who first appeared in First Doctor TV story “The Celestial Toymaker” and was due to appear in the Sixth Doctor TV Season 22 but the story was cut, though you can listen to an adaptation of “The Nightmare Fair” via Big Finish audio drama. The character has also reappeared in comics and other audios so the idea that this story is the second time the two have met certainly hand-waves a lot of continuity, just like the whole Meep thing. Ah well, Time War etc.
Speaking of destroying continuity this is also framed as the first time The Doctor has met Mel since she left with Sabalom Glitz in “Dragonfire”, but Big Finish started a range of audios where Mel reunites with the Seventh Doctor and Ace not too long ago… admittedly these stories have been pretty poor as a whole so at least if they’re erased I won’t be too upset. Also as mentioned Amy Pond’s exit in “The Angels Take Manhattan”, Clara’s death in “Face the Raven” and eventual fate in “Hell Bent” and Bill Pott’s last story in “World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls” are all directly mentioned, as is the Flux storyline from the Thirteenth Doctor’s run (again!). Also The Master’s fate from the end of “The Power of the Doctor” is revealed, in that he was apparently too injured to regenerate but played a game with the Toymaker in exchange for a new life, but lost the game instead.
There is a little speech in the spoiler part of the story that mentions stuff like the Doctor’s exile, the Key to Time season, Fourth Doctor TV story “Logopolis”, Adric’s fate in the Fifth Doctor story “Earthshock”, and more. The Toymaker’s pop-song-backed insane dance was very similar to a scene featuring Russell T. Davies’ crazy Master in “The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords”, a story that also got a couple of other references in this story as well.
Overall Thoughts:
I’m glad Kate Lethbridge-Stewart has remained in charge of UNIT. She’s started to catch up to her father in number of Doctors they’ve been on-screen with!
“The Giggle” was anything other than boring, that’s for sure! While the controversial handling of the Fourteenth Doctor’s regeneration is an obvious talking point I will say that the scenes directly after that were fantastic and Neil Patrick Harris played a fine, if not a little too OTT, villain. Looking at the “Next Time” for the Christmas special I have no idea what’s going to happen, but I will say this little mini-series for the 60th has been good fun overall.
Donna and Mel run to The Doctor’s side as he regenerates, but the process stops and The Doctor asks his two companions to pull each of his arms, causing Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor to pop out from the side of him. This is identified as a “Bi-generation” where the next Doctor is created but the previous one is still left alive, something “thought of as a myth”. The two Doctors separate and I have to say that as weird and out-of-nowhere as the concept is Ncuti immediately began to steal the show with his performance, so I very quickly didn’t care. The two Doctors then both challenge the Toymaker to the third round and instead of picking something where they can use their knowledge or use the fact it’s two against one to their advantage they instead pick a simple game of catch, which leads to a long “dramatic” sequence of catch which luckily for them ends with the Toymaker missing the ball, and for his prize the Fourteenth Doctor choses to banish the Toymaker forever… though his gold tooth is left behind, which is picked up by a mysterious woman while past Master laughs can be heard in an exact recreation of the very same scene from the end of “Last of the Time Lords”… that got a laugh out of me as well, I must admit!
I’ve got screenshots of every regeneration up on this blog and this has to be the weirdest one of them all, and I caught a screenshot of Sylvester McCoy pulling a weird face during his!
With the villain defeated the two Doctors and Donna hang out in the TARDIS and Doc. 15 says that the reason he’s so happy and comfortable with himself is because Doc. 14 went through some sort of rehab, finally stopping after countless adventures (some of which were name-dropped!) and actually enjoying life for a while. The earlier Doctor doesn’t think he could be in one place without the TARDIS so the new Doctor uses his Toymaker victory wish to make a copy of their trademark craft for himself, leaving the original with his earlier self. The Fourteenth Doctor goes on to do just that, he lives with the Nobles (and the occasionally appearing Mel for some reason) with odd trips in the TARDIS, while the Fifteenth Doctor heads out on his adventures as the “current” Doctor. So basically after ripping into Steven Moffat for all his companion exits being the same Russell T. Davies ends up doing the same ending that he did with Rose: a David Tennant Doctor that gets to live with a companion in a normal life while the main Doctor continues on…
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