Doctor Who: The Vanquishers Review - 4 Ups & 9 Downs

After a brief chat with the Ood (who, despite being in cahoots with The Doctor, has just sort of been left to wander around), The Doctor rips off her conversion plate just as Swarm places a hand on her. As it turns, this has a truly remarkable result. The plate has the ability to split the main character across three plots simultaneously - this is the greatest stroke of luck in the history of strokes of luck.

The subsequent scenes contain some of the worst editing in the history of the show, and are incredibly disorientating. It’s barely explained to us what is happening, and what little context we get is drowned out completely by a mess of noise - so much so that we missed this on our first watch. The end result? The Doctor is still on The Division ship and has failed to escape, but she’s also in the side plot, because it wasn’t overcrowded enough already.

Later, we discover that The Doctor isn’t just teleporting about, but in fact has split herself in three and exists in three places simultaneously. Just as we get used to this, two of The Doctors meet each other, spending a portion of the episode together. The problem is, unlike previous stories with identical Doctors such as Journey’s End and The Almost People, the episode makes no attempt to distinguish these two versions, and also almost never has both of them in one shot, making every scene with both of them in more than a little confusing.