"You've discovered television, haven't you?...by showing an enormous building on your television screen, you can do what seemed impossible, couldn't you?"

------ An Unearthly Child

This anniversary is, a soft jump-off point for some just as much as a jump-on point for others, and in a way, the end of this 60-year show for those who decide to leave afterwards ("it's time"). So it's only apt when television, more specifically, the genesis of television, is invoked here, as it looks back, not un-critically, as it always has done, at the overarching effect of screens, television, escapist entertainment and this show itself (who makes abundantly clear in its very first outing 60 years ago that its own narrative driving force, the Tardis, is an allegory for television) has had on human psyche, the intended and unintended havoc it could wreak on humanity when fallen into the wrong hands, the social responsibility it bears, via the overt "medium is the message" sci-fi shenanigans.

And truth to be told, this is barely anything we have not heard of repeatedly. If anything, the outright preach of the Doctor at UNIT headquarter rings hollow, because if there's one thing humanity exceeds at, is to find something or someone to blame, and here the scapegoat (Toymaker) is clearer than ever. Just like somehow Hitler as a human was not capable of inflammatory incitement and causing mass hysteria but that Nazi became Nazi because it was aided by alien black magic in Timewyrm: Exodus, it once again demonstrates the rather weak persuasiveness of using traditional alien-invasion sci-fi tropes to convey social messaging. And such trope is everywhere in Doctor Who: from The Mind of Evil to The Fearmonger to Rise of the Cybermen to The Sound of Drums etc etc. And this is why in contrast Midnight is special --- external menace should only serve as a trigger, and the real horror would lie in the human decisions in response to that trigger, through their own agency. Unfortunately, The Giggle is just another boring "total submission to mind control" story done 100th times over.

Let's talk about the execution. Intentional or not, this 3-episode min-series can be seen as Russell channeling the respective styles of 3 show-runners of the revival era. Star Beast being the RTD1 family fun and goof on steroids, Wild Blue Yonder a Moffat-esque mystery box and The Giggle, oh well, a Chibnall-esque mess but with better characterizations. Here we've got:

1. Jumping through time back and forth and back and forth again.

2. An overbearing and flamboyant villain who also did a pointless dance sequence, although you could say RTD1's master is the original archetype of such character and Sacha Dhawan was already a copy.

3. Loads of ideas and individual unconnected vignettes stiched together at a rushing pacing leaving no room to breathe. And vast majority of those scenes are boring as fuck.

4. Incredible amount of expositions, info-dumps and outright preachy speeches, tell not show on steroids, akin to the worst type of Chibnall messaging we see in Orphan 55 (doctor's speech) and Spyfall (villain's speech).

5. The Toymaker name-checking all the big bad villains he defeated at ease off-screen, including The Master and tons of god-like beings, is akin to The Master destroying gallifrey off-screen, conveniently.

6. Towards the end the two doctors have one minute worth of namedrop, namedrop and namedrop. It's another (maybe even worse) type of worship of image and iconography, that the mere mention of names is enough to tickle a certain sense of nostalgia or anemoia. The utter void of content, the empty signifiers of past companions and past doctors in The Power of the Doctor should have been critically examined and responded to, but we're treated with the exact same thing here in the final 10 minutes.

And all this is not to say the episode is without its merits and fun moments. Donna continues to be immensely enjoyable and the subversion of Hero-companion complex, something started as a subtext during Moffat era, has now come to the forefront, albeit again in typical RTD heavy-handed fashion, now manifested in direct, rather un-subtle character dialogue. And I don't mind this bi-generation shenanigan whatsoever, particularly when it's used to offer a closure, a soft conclusion as much as a soft reboot of the show.

Moving on to 15th (and the promptly titled "season one"), we are looking at jukebox, disco ball dance, queer physicality (as the last 20 minutes of this episode pivots to), goblins and fairy tales, and likely a much less serious tone overall. Time moves on and it's only inevitable many fans will leave, I may leave, and not for "woke" reasons but for a shift in style, as the show pivots to a much younger, gen-Z audience. We shall see.