Trivia / Doctor Who S36 E12 "The Doctor Falls"

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• Author's Saving Throw: The Twelfth Doctor mentions how Cybermen always show up wherever humanity and humanoids in general go — "parallel evolution" he calls it, which not only means that the Big Finish Cybermen origin story "Spare Parts" is still canon, but also amends the gigantic continuity error that was the Expanded Universe comic "The World Shapers" (in which the Cybermen are depicted as originating from the Voord on Marinus).
  • Also, if you wonder how Mondasian Cybermen can look like Cybus Cybermen (in episodes like Closing Time, where Word of God declared unaltered new series Cybermen to actually be the Mondasian ones; Steven Moffat wanted to use the originals but the budget to make a bunch of old-school Cyberman costumes wasn't there, but that left us without an In-Universe explanation.) This episode sheds light on it - apparently, Cybermen originate in way more than just two places and usually end up looking quite similar; every origin will probably create every later variant given enough time. This explains pretty much any instance of any sort of Cybermen being where they're not supposed to throughout the series in any era.
  • And, of course, if that still isn't good enough for an old-school Cyber-fan, say hello to three generations together.
• Conclusion in Another Medium: The "Twice Upon a Time" Novelization explains that Nardole lived for almost five centuries after this episode's events, and was successful enough at defeating later Cyberman invasions that he and the farmers only had to deal with Cybermat infestations in the spring by the time he died! More information appears in the YouTube short "The Best of Days", released in 2020.
• Distanced from Current Events: An online, Twitter-based fan watch-a-long of "World Enough and Time" and this was supposed to serve as the finale of several weeks of rescreenings during 2020's Doctor Who Lockdown, but it would have run on June 6, just after Black Lives Matter/anti-Police Brutality protests erupted in the United States and elsewhere. The organizers decided going ahead with it would have been in bad taste given what Bill goes through in this story, and cancelled the event. Instead, the scheduled airdate saw the debut of the epilogue short "The Best of Days", which features Bill and Nardole after they've earned their happy endings, and even has her discuss the protests.
• The Other Darrin: The First Doctor is played by David Bradley who played William Hartnell in the docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time about Doctor Who's early years (many fans noted how with the makeup Bradley looked a lot like the First Doctor, and did a spot-on imitation of Hartnell's performance), technically making this a Role Reprise of some degree (Bradley is directly playing the First Doctor this time and not just Hartnell as him). This is not without precedent, the 20th anniversary special "The Five Doctors" had done it before by tapping actor Richard Hurndall to play the First Doctor, since William Hartnell had long since passed away, and Hurndall too passed away a few months after the premiere of "The Five Doctors". Not to mention that Big Finish has been doing this too for quite some time, if sparingly.
• Wag the Director: According to Steven Moffat, Peter Capaldi made a change to the Doctor's speech:
  When Peter was performing it, he made a very bold actor decision. The Doctor says, "When I say no, you turn back around". At which point in the script, it said, "Such is his force, they stop and find themselves turning around". Peter said, "Can I not do it that way? Can I fail to make them turn around, so that I have to run around in front of them? I don't want to be pompous. It's not "The Zygon Inversion", where I am putting on the swagger"...What Peter wanted to do, is it's ripped from his very soul.
• What Could Have Been: This was originally written as a straightforward Grand Finale for the Twelfth Doctor, ending with his regeneration into the Thirteenth Doctor. Then Steven Moffat learned that — contrary to what he had planned/expected — incoming showrunner Chris Chibnall wasn't going to use the 2017 Christmas Episode as the introductory story for Thirteen, and intended to just skip it. Then Moffat learned that the BBC wouldn't commission any more Doctor Who Christmas specials if one were skipped and the annual tradition abandoned. Once he'd convinced Peter Capaldi to come back for one more episode, Moffat revised this script to lead directly into the events of "Twice Upon a Time", the Twelfth Doctor's true sendoff. Note that this means the Thirteenth Doctor being a woman was apparently planned to happen without any advance notice of who would be playing the new Doctor (which in hindsight makes the moment where the Master says "The future isn't going to be all girl?" and the Doctor's "We can only hope" retort even more of a wink to the audience, though had it occurred with no advance notice, the blowback from the few fans who were not in support of the decision might have been even worse than it was when the announcement was made).
• You Look Familiar: David Bradley becomes the third actor after Colin Baker and Peter Capaldi to play the Doctor after having played another character on the show, in his case the villain Solomon in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" (though unlike them, he's playing an old incarnation of the Doctor, not a new one).

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