THE DOCTOR WHO RATINGS GUIDE: BY FANS, FOR FANS

---

The DVD special edition Downtime Mawdryn Undead The novelisation

BBC Battlefield

---

Episodes	4
Story No#	156
Production Code	7N
Season	26
Dates	Sept. 6, 1989 - Sept. 27, 1989

With Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred. Written by Ben Aaronovitch. Script-edited wby Andrew Cartmel. Directed by Michael Kerrigan. Produced by John Nathan-Turner.

Synopsis: Morgaine, a queen of warriors from another dimension, invades Earth again with her mystic warriors, intending to conquer the planet. The Doctor soon discovers that his role in the affair is already written...

• It May Be Fantasy, But it Sure Ain't Mine by Joe Briggs-Ritchie
• "The future. That is, my personal future." by Hugh Sturgess
• "Are They Not Magnificent?" by Jason A. Miller

It May Be Fantasy, But it Sure Ain't Mine by Joe Briggs-Ritchie 26/3/13

I hadn't seen Battlefield in at least 10 years. I found it entertaining as a child then sort of went off it as a teenager and the intervening decade allowed its memory to fester in my mind. I thought therefore that it was time to revisit it, probably to confirm my perceived dislike of it if I'm honest.

And guess what? I didn't like it. I was also reminded of the fact that there seem to be rather a lot of sparks in the McCoy era. I mean just look at those guns...

I think the worst aspect of it is that it lacks subtlety. Just like The Happiness Patrol and Paradise Towers, it is a prime example of how something may have been watchable at the time of broadcast but now merely comes across as painful. It's really quite amazing that such extremes as Battlefield and The Curse of Fenric can be found within the same season. I genuinely believe that Season 26 is one of the finest the series ever produced, so it's a bit of a shame that the season begins with Battlefield. That's not to say that it doesn't have commendable touches here and there. Sylvester McCoy has utterly made the part his own by this point, leaving behind those last vestiges of clownishness from Season 24. He's actually pretty damn intense sometimes, the confrontation with Morgaine in the missile room being a case in point. He has a nice line in wit yet remains constantly in control, never allowing it to descend into silliness. It's also nice to see how UNIT has developed while the Doctor has been away from them and they now are the multinational organisation that their initials imply. Here we see Polish officers, Czech officers, a black female brigadier... Quite the change from the early Seventies. The reference to Liz Shaw is a nice little continuity reference, even if Bambera wasn't impressed with the ruse.

Speaking of Brigadier Bambera, she is very much a larger-than-life character, much less subtle than Lethbridge-Stewart but somehow more severe. Angela Bruce does a great job with the role, playing the character straight but knowing when to inject little touches of humour. It's also great to see Nicholas Courtney again; his appearances throughout the series are always a joy and he seems to have instant rapport with whichever actor happens to be playing the Doctor. Jean Marsh is effective also as the witch queen Morgaine. Mordred, on the other hand, is a bit limp and lacks genuine menace. Likes a good giggle too... Ancelyn is a bit wet although his crush on Bambera is quite amusing. I think Ace referring to Shou Yuing as 'yellow' and 'slant-eyed' is going a bit too far quite, frankly.

Credit where credit's due, it's a pretty successful story from a visual persepctive. The spaceship looks quite impressive, even if it is only a model. The centrepiece of Battlefield is the Destroyer, a design masterpiece. It doesn't really do very much in the grand scheme of things, but it looks amazing, proof that by this point the show is really moving into a new era of design successes. Say what you like about the McCoy era, a lot of it is pretty impressive to look at.

Unfortunately, I find the unappealing aspects of Battlefield to massively outweigh the successes. One of the biggest gripes I have is with the music. I've never enjoyed any of Keff McCulloch's contributions to Doctor Who; they lack subtlety, are massively intrusive and are far too obviously a product of the Eighties and not in a good way. Although I haven't seen Time and the Rani or Dragonfire in a long time, I seem to recall that their scores had potential in places, but the synth orchestral hits with which he filled up Remembrance of the Daleks and Silver Nemesis quickly become tiresome. He is easily my least favourite of all the Doctor Who composers and comparing his McCoy scores with those of the wonderful Mark Ayres is very much a contrast of the sublime and the ridiculous.

Battlefield is by far the weakest story of Season 26. Actually, let me rephrase that: it's the only weak story of Season 26. I think even with just a different musical score it would be a lot better, still not great but certainly a vast improvement on it stands. Failing that, the alternative solution is to watch Ghost Light, The Curse of Fenric and Survival and simply pretend that Battlefield never happened. It works for me...

"The future. That is, my personal future." by Hugh Sturgess 8/8/15

Battlefield depicts an alternative history of Britain in which King Arthur, witches and wizards existed, buried only a little way beneath the surface. It also gives a hint of another alternative history, of Doctor Who in the nineties. The threads that led to the new series sixteen years later were already coalescing. Mark Gatiss wrote a script for the series just in time for the show to go off air. Russell T Davies actually submitted a script, which would eventually become The Long Game, and Steven Moffat would surely not have been far behind. The series itself was evolving towards something twenty-first century viewers would find familiar: an empowered working-class companion whose personal issues and family are treated as material for episodes, and a Doctor who bends time and meets people from his future. This feels like the series we know today, much more than the Davison years or even the heights of Tom Baker. With so many of the new series' key contributors waiting in the wings, it isn't hard to imagine that something very much like the new series might have aired in 1990 or '91. Renaming Terror of the Autons "Jo" is unthinkable. Renaming Dragonfire "Ace" is not.

The series is operating in a very different way. The difference between the use of the Brigadier here and in his last performance (The Five Doctors) is stunning. In 1983, he was used as nothing more than a signifier of Doctor Who, written into the story simply because he "had" to be there. Here, Aaronovitch is using the Brigadier because he suits the story. Battlefield is about Arthurian mythology, a very specifically British legend. In many ways, it is Britain's national creation myth. Arthur is Britain's greatest leader, a warrior who will rise once again in its time of greatest need. So who should Battlefield have to lead the forces of good? Who else?

This is an enormous innovation for Doctor Who. The author is examining the character in his own right and making a statement by including him. The days of Warriors of the Deep, which exists simply to provide a vehicle for the Silurians and the Sea Devils with no thought as to why this was worthwhile, are behind us. This story venerates the Brigadier in a way that only a second-generation fan (who came of age in time for the wilderness years) could. The Brigadier is almost a more central character than the Doctor. The Doctor receives the vision of Morgaine ("Let this be your last battlefield!"), but he's an immortal time-traveller who meets Morgaine in his future. The Brigadier is woken from his sleep when Morgaine enters this universe, in a moment that it clearly intended to reflect causation. (And Arthur is said to be "sleeping" until he is needed...) Morgaine's first act is to shoot down the Brig's helicopter, and he is the first person from this universe she speaks to. The moment when Mordred hoists the Doctor by his own petard ("Look me in the eye...") and the Brigadier calmly puts his gun to Mordred's head and says "try me" is the moment when the Brigadier becomes an utterly mythic figure. It is using him with respect, not as an item for John Nathan-Turner to name at a convention for applause.

Originally, the story followed through on its Arthurian parallels and killed the Brigadier. I'm in two minds about that. On the pro side (pro-death, that is), it fits with the story's theme of Arthur really being dead and the series' broader current themes of the icons of the past being swept aside as outdated (Daleks, Cybermen, the Master) as the Doctor moves onto a new stage of evolution. I'm guessing that the Brigadier would have been buried in the spaceship and blown up as his funeral pyre, to complete the Arthurian imagery. That would have been a suitably heroic send-off for the character, and there's no way that his confrontation with the Destroyer, with that awesomely humble line ("I just do the best I can"), would not have become one of the best regarded in the show's history had it been his last.

On the other hand (the pro-life side, if you will), there's something gloriously in character for the Brigadier to have that epic, final confrontation and sacrifice himself, the Doctor raging over his body, and then to pick himself up, dust himself down and go back to gardening. He has never been a glory-hound, he has always been willing to die for his duty but has never sought to. A simple, humble man slays the doomsday monster the Destroyer before it can do anything, and lives to tell the tale because he decides he doesn't want to die. It brilliantly subverts the death drive of heroic mythology. The Brigadier has been tracking the Arthurian storyline throughout, setting everything up for the heroic self-sacrifice. But not today. Some days are special. Some days are so, so blessed.

Keeping the Brigadier alive also serves the story in another way. This is a Brigadier/UNIT story that is avowedly anti-war. Of course, past UNIT stories like The Mind of Evil and Day of the Daleks had a clear anti-war position, but this is a rather cleverer examination of that, because it isn't afraid to turn its gaze on UNIT. Battlefield gives us a classic UNIT battle scene with pyrotechnics and extras doing convoluted gymnastics, and it's fun. But, after the battle, Bambera stares grimly into the dead eyes of a shockingly young fallen knight and it stops being fun. Ancelyn describes it wistfully as "a good fight", and we are meant to agree with the disgusted look Bambera shoots him. Even describing the Brigadier, as Morgaine does, as "steeped in blood" is rather darker than anything the Pertwee era did.

For a story called Battlefield, it resolutely refuses to conform to heroic storytelling. The great battle between UNIT and space knights from a parallel universe is merely a ruse. Ancelyn, the character directly out of heroic legends who looks forward to dying in battle, believes at the climax that Mordred has killed Bambera, and declares that there is "no life without her" - but then Bambera stands up. Morgaine and her knights have come to our universe to claim Excalibur, which the Doctor lets her take because it's just an alien artefact and isn't worth dying over. Even the strange anti-climax, in which Arthur turns out to be dead all along and Morgaine meekly allows herself to be taken into custody, side-steps the notion that there is something glorious about dying in battle. Ancelyn has been eager to die in battle all through this story, and yet in the end none of the warriors - the Brig, Ancelyn, Bambera and even Morgaine and her son - cop it. It responds to the heroic's lust for battle and death by modestly asking, "Why don't we just say no?"

Morgaine, as everyone has said, is a wonderfully complex villain. Everything about this has already been said - her pause in fighting to pay respect for Earth's fallen soldiers, killing Lavel then giving Elizabeth back her sight... but it's interesting that, in having her won over by the Doctor's diatribe against nuclear war, the story is pitching her, for all the mayhem and bloodshed she has caused, as morally superior to mutually assured destruction. The Doctor's instruction to lock up the powerful sorceress Morgaine seems bewildering at first glance, but the episode clearly is of the view that Morgaine's spirit has been entirely broken by discovering that Arthur died a thousand years ago and her epic vendetta has no purpose. That revelation is pretty brutal. She seeks to face Arthur in single combat, and learns she cannot even look upon his body. This subtly continues the story's anti-war bent. Morgaine has spent a millennium fighting and now finds that what she truly cares about has vanished without her noticing. Like the Brigadier, she has no future now but to fade away. The Brigadier wants to fade away, but to Morgaine, who dedicated her life to war, it is a bleak future indeed.

Doctor Who's biggest problem has never been its budget. However, Battlefield's is. Google "sci-fi knight" and see the first images that pop up. That's what Aaronovitch was aiming at with the hi-tech armoured knights from a parallel universe, and they look AWESOME. But the series no longer has the money to build their own knight costumes and so they stick with the historical look. Their energy weapons look like '70s zap guns, and when they fire they emit a puff of sparks and a hilariously wimpy "pow" noise. When they ditch those and start flailing about with their swords, they're even worse. Aaronovitch wants alien knights with lasers and broadswords fighting UNIT on the site of Arthur's final battle. The "action" sequence in the notorious "boom!" scene is meant to show an explosion blowing Ancelyn through the air and into a building. But the script has badly misjudged its budget. Remake Battlefield today with a decent budget and it would achieve the epic sweep it is aiming for. Battlefield could not do what it wanted to do in 1989, but as the Doctor almost says in this story, it could in the future.

It is appropriate that Battlefield is set "five minutes into the future" and features figures from the Doctor's future, since it has more in common with post-1990 Doctor Who than the show pre-1988. There is so much here that has echoes in the new series that surely Season Twenty-Six is the ideal jumping-on point for new fans to get into the original series. The Doctor's past has intersected with his present many times before in the Nathan-Turner era, God knows, but this time his future has. The seventh Doctor, the arch-manipulator, is faced with events that he doesn't know about and people who know all his tricks (hence Mordred's recycling of the "look me in the eye" gambit) and improvises brilliantly. This is the seed, the moment of invention, that leads to River Song. Steven Moffat is of the same generation of Aaronovitch and Marc Platt and the other authors of this period and it is unthinkable that, had the series continued on air into the '90s, he would not have contributed scripts.

Since Remembrance of the Daleks, the show has begun to treat the Doctor in a mythic fashion, not because of a conscious decision but because fans of the series are now old enough to write for it. They are basing their stories on a lived, childhood-defining experience of Doctor Who, with a history that stretches back into the distant past. The Doctor's future life as Merlin is fascinating in that he is clearly so unsettled by it. The seventh Doctor likes to be anonymous and unnoticed, but here everyone knows who he is. That's what makes Mordred's quoting of the Doctor's own words back at him so clever. His reputation has preceded him. From the pen of the author who started the Doctor on his mythic phase, this story stretches that myth into the future to suggest that the Doctor's legend is bigger than himself, and is bigger than he'd like it to be. As another devotee of the mythic Doctor would write more than twenty years later, the Doctor has a long and dangerous past, but his future is infinitely more terrifying.

The note the future Doctor leaves and the scene in which the Doctor gets into the spaceship using his voice-print have a playfulness to them that is very similar to the new series. Hell, maybe the Doctor who becomes Merlin is the eleventh. He is the only future one we know who is absent-minded enough to forget Morgaine hijacking the nuclear missile, obliging him to put it in a P.S. And he has form in matters Arthurian. After all, he is intimately involved with an unearthly woman who emerges from a lake, hangs around ancient Britain and sees the Doctor live backwards through time. Coincidence? An impossible sorceress will rise from the deep and strike the Time Lord dead.

The modernisation of UNIT is also something familiar to new-series fans, and it's interesting that the series has finally made UNIT a truly international outfit rather than the firmly British force it was under Pertwee (it's that Britishness that helps the Brigadier fill the role of Arthur). This is surely another judgement of the past and finding it wanting, exactly as the series should do from time to time. This isn't the kind of "return of X" that the Saward years were notorious for, but a reimagining of the basic concept to (attempt to) prove why it is worthwhile. As with the Doctor-as-Merlin plot, the series is not ending, as it could, on introspection and self-absorption but by imagining a brave new future. Angela Bruce has one note as Brigadier Bambera (angry), but she's a good character, "oh shame!" and all. Her line "now I'm vexed" is so wonderfully timed I had to laugh out loud. Despite very little screen-time to develop it, I found her romance with Ancelyn quite sweet, not least because both Bruce and Marcus Gilbert are very dishy. Putting Ancelyn, the story's most unironically heroic character, to work on the lawnmower is a rather delightful ending too.

It's wonderful that, at the end of the show's original run, the series is so boldly looking forward. The Nathan-Turner years of Davison and Baker the Second fell into the rut of always looking back, always recycling and fetishising the past, before this final, brilliant moment of innovation. A book range would probably have still stemmed from a series that ended with Trial of a Time Lord or Season Twenty-Two (that was an economic decision), and writers like Aaronovitch and Platt would surely have written for it, but the ethos of those books would have been very different. Would there have been the will to invent a new story for the Doctor? It would have been easier to do what the TV series had been doing for the last five years and sold books based on returning monsters and characters. They would have been poorer had their jumping off point been The Two Doctors and Trial, instead of a final run of episodes that escaped the quagmire of the past to set out a new direction for the series. Season Twenty-Six seems to systematically clear the decks for a brave new era of Doctor Who. No more Ian Levine, no more pornographic violence, no more returning monsters and characters. Pre-2005, it was at best a tragedy, the creative renaissance cut off in its prime. Today we have a vindication of the approach Cartmel and Nathan-Turner adopted.

"Are They Not Magnificent?" by Jason A. Miller 11/8/19

OK, OK, I get it, I get it. This story is ludicrous. At least, that's what most of the reviews above this one tell me.

Actually, it's also what my eyes and ears tell me.

Referring to the original broadcast episodes, not the Special Edition released to DVD (Oh no. Not the Special Edition.), it's undeniable that Battlefield is horribly acted, horribly directed, horribly edited. Even Nicholas Courtney seems to be reading from cue cards in the very first scene, and when Sergent Zbrigniev speaks for the first time in the second scene, as if he were a block of elm that had, Wizard of Oz-style, magically come to life and started reciting stilted prose, you realize that this is whole thing is just going to be in for deep hurting.

But, if you can suspend disbelief, Battlefield is a radically awesome story. And when I say "suspend disbelief", it's not like I'm saying that Battlefield is the one story in a run of uninterrupted greatness that's ruined by bad production. I think that most of the Sylvester McCoy era requires near-constant suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy.

There are many out there in fandom who believe that the eight stories of the Cartmel Masterplan era (all of Seasons 25 and 26) run like this, in terms of references to famous movies: Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, Robot Monster, Poltergeist, Plan 9 From Outer Space, The Shining, Apocalypse Now, and A Nightmare on Elm Street -- six of the more transformative classics of all time, and two outright duds.

But, c'mon. Even the other six stories, the ones that most of fandom loves, require you to ignore tons of bad acting, directing, editing and music.

So, when I ask you to suspend disbelief and focus on what's going on under the surface that makes Battlefield important, I'm not asking you to do something radically different than what it takes to enjoy a Remembrance of the Daleks or a The Curse of Fenric. Battlefield on its surface is ridiculous, but, yes, so are the other stories. It's what's going on under the surface that's so important.

When Zbrigniev shows up in that second scene, all of a sudden UNIT goes from six British soldiers in an old manor house to an actual international organization. Brigadier Bambera is first shot from a distance in a rear-view mirror to obscure the fact that the Brigadier has turned into a black woman (or, even better, a biracial woman of partial African descent). All the chest-pounding outcry in 2018 about how Jodie Whittaker is a betrayal of Doctor Who's true legacy, as the last safe haven for the white male, has nothing on what it meant 30 years ago -- in the 1980s, no less -- to replace Nicholas Courtney with a black woman.

Within a few minutes, the story changes locations to reveal a blind woman reading Braille and Shou Yuing, a Chinese character presented as an actual functional fully-rounded human, as opposed to the duped lackey of an ancient god or a bunch of mute tong soldiers a la The Talons of Weng-Chiang. In its previous 25 years, Doctor Who dealt mostly with able-bodied white characters, with everyone else shoved to the margins or relegated to tertiary bad guys. But, within the first 12 minutes of Part One of Battlefield, we've already broken that mold four times: Zbrigniev, Bambera, Pat Rowlinson, Shou Yuing.

Yes, Jason, you say, but the story is still awful in spite of the casting (and, in at least two of those four cases, awful because of the actors cast). Why does any of this multiculturalism matter?

"Merlin, against all hope," says Ancelyn, a typical blondish-haired white guy, to the Doctor, towards the end of Part One. In Marc Platt's novelization, this recitation is a magical, cliffhanger moment, calling back to a lushly-written prologue featuring a future Doctor playing Merlin to a dying King Arthur. On TV, unfortunately, it's a limply acted moment, completely botched by the actor and director. If this was the best that the white people could do, then it's clear that Doctor Who needed to broaden its horizons and learn that talent isn't determined by birthplace or birthright.

"You're under arrest; you, and your freaky friends" -- Bambera to the Doctor and companions; Part Two

Shou Yuing for me is the most interesting character. Not so much because of Ling Tai's acting, of course. But Shou Yuing didn't grow up in England, and doesn't take for granted all the references to Arthurian mythology and Christianity. That makes her the story's Greek chorus. After a confrontation early in Part Two in which resonant, mighty names like Merlin and Mordred and Morgaine are exchanged a dozen times each, Shou Yuing indicates that she's never heard of any of them. Awesome! Later on, when Ace later on asks if they need holy water to fend off a magical assault, Shou Yuing replies "I don't know, it's not my mythology" -- that's a lovely line to perforate someone else's ethnocentricity, and I've borrowed it for myself in real life.

Part Two introduces Lavel, a French helicopter pilot who speaks heavily accented English. It's to her that Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart reveals himself to be a dinosaur, when asking, in reference to Bambera, "Good man, is he?", which the musical score punctuates with a comedy sting. This is played against Ancelyn and Winifred (Bambera) -- Lancelot and Guinevere, in other words -- auditioning Doctor Who's first interracial relationship. Those relationships became the norm in the New Series, but this is the first time Doctor Who says, Hey!, we can do this.

Less successful is Ace, briefly mind-controlled by Morgaine in Part Three, assailing Shou Yuing with racial slurs. We'd already gotten some racial hostility earlier in the story, but it doesn't work coming from the hero. Now, if the utterance of those slurs had been the catalyst to cause Ace to realize that she was being mind-controlled, that could have been a special moment... but Michael Kerrigan didn't direct the scene that way.

Morgaine is one of the Classic Series' most interesting villains ever. The key to writing a truly great villain -- and this true, to a lesser extent, of Sharaz Jek in The Caves of Androzani, or of Tobias Vaughn in The Invasion, the gold standards of Classic Series villainy up to this point -- is to have them believe that they're the hero of the piece and to give them a couple of moments of heroism or at least non-outright villainy. Morgaine has plenty of that, with her impromptu remembrance ceremony at a World War I memorial in Part Two and her "I must pay the tab" scene in Part Three. Yes, Jean Marsh overacts the material in places -- but you can hardly blame her, because that's what everybody else was doing on location, too. I mean, compare the funny faces that an "unconscious" Sylvester McCoy makes while knocked out during the Part Two cliffhanger. Honestly, Doctor, this is no time for goofy faces. Even if this story is at least in part a Pertwee-era homage...

Morgaine's killing of Lavel in Part Three -- sucking her brain dry to obtain knowledge of the enemy's armed forces and then incinerating the corpse -- is standard villainy stuff. But Morgaine is shown to have a conscience -- her son Mordred had just been drinking the pub owners dry -- so she pays his tab by restoring the sight of the innkeeper's blind wife. This is a remarkable bit of business; obviously Keff McCulloch thought so, because he underlines the scene with synth-pop so loud than you can barely hear the dialogue. But it's a fine, fine moment for the classic series, one of its most interesting moments of examining the thin line between heroism and villainy, good and evil.

Because Morgaine doesn't just have fine qualities even as a villain; it's also that the good guys are revealed to be a bit doltish. In this new diverse world, the white people are hopelessly out of step. Apart from the Brigadier assuming that Bambera would be male, he also expresses shock at her first name ("Winifred"). Peter Warmsly, the English Lit professor and amateur archaeologist, is rather impotent in having uncovered only an inch of battlefield in ten years' worth of excavation, which Ace upends in six seconds with one nitro-nine blast. Rowlinson, the innkeeper, who should not be an objectionable character in a script such as this, where he has no displacement on the plot, is given a moment of institutionalized nativism, as he suspiciously tells UNIT's Major Husak, an accented Czech, "You're not English, are you." Clearly this man voted for Brexit in 2016.

OK, now that I've talked about why Battlefield is important and admirable, I'll give in and acknowledge that, yes, the rest of it is unmitigated rubbish. Aaronovitch's original scripts aren't the problem -- Marc Platt took those and turned them right into the novelization, which is an all-timer. It's the tattered remnants of Aaronovitch's scripts as processed through Michael Kerrigan and the budget and Keff McCulloch and everything else that's so worthy of scorn. Mock away, Jason, I can hear you say now.

"Ahahaha! AAAhahahaha! Haaaahahaa!" -- Mordred in Part Two, for 13 full seconds. I mean, really. Was everyone in the post-production suite just asleep during edit? And then most of Part Four, the climax, revolves around the Doctor and Ace and Morgaine and Mordred playing catch with Excalibur. Whee.

Of course, the Cartmel Masterplan stuff isn't lovely, either. "Whenever this Doctor turns up -- all Hell breaks loose," says Zbrigniev (rather woodenly). That's a fundamental misinterpretation of the character -- he turns up to prevent Hell from breaking loose. But it was the primary conceit of the Cartmel era and of the New Adventure books to follow, that the Doctor caused more chaos and havoc than he prevented. This story seems to want to tell us that if the Doctor didn't turn up, Morgaine would not have had to resort to ordering Mordred to kill all the UNIT soldiers or to unleashing the Destroyer or threatening a nuclear launch. Then again, if the Doctor didn't turn up, Morgaine acquires Excalibur and unleashes Hell somewhere else.

It's easy to look at the surface of the story and say "This is dreadful". And it is, it is. But, again, so was most of the McCoy era. You have to look under the surface to find the amazing stuff, and, fortunately, there's plenty of amazing stuff here.

In the final scene, the women gang up and take over the day, leaving the men behind to do the gardening and cooking at the Lethbridge-Stewart homestead. It took us 29 more years, but that world is finally, finally here. As the camera pulls back, and as you see Ace and Bambera and Shou Yuing and Doris driving away in Bessie -- look. See that? Isn't that Jodie Whittaker standing in the distance, watching them and waving?