"What was the last thing you said? It took like over a year to get you out of my head."

A couple of odd, plot adjacent thoughts flashed through my mind during Empire of Death. When the TARDIS became corrupted by Sutekh I wondered if, given that there was a duplicate TARDIS sitting in Chiswick in Donna Noble’s garden, and probably not more than a couple of metres away from an, if not exactly duplicate, then certainly, additional Doctor, one or the other would make an appearance before the episode was out.

Now, these mini-speculations turned out to be not so much plot adjacent as plot perpendicular, and rightly so. Russell T Davies is far too wise a writer and showrunner to bring back David Tennant’s Doctor to help save the day during Ncuti Gatwa’s first Doctor Who season finalé; the meta implications of that are pretty dreadful all round.¹

But these foolish thoughts sent me off down a rabbit hole all the same. Because when that dust started rolling across the Earth, eliminating all its path like an even-more-debilitating-than-usual form of hayfever pollen, it implicitly disintegrated that additional Doctor and maybe his TARDIS.² Which is when I knew that this wave of destruction would be reversed before the end of the episode.