TV Here we are then, the first teaser or final trailer for The Power of the Doctor, the 13th Doctor Jodie Whittaker's swan song. It's bitter sweet. Such a good incarnation, such a dodgy showrunner. Chris meant well but never quite managed to decided what he wanted to do with it. It happens and as is always the case with Doctor Who, I'd say in the end there were probably the usual selection of great, average and rubbish episodes, from an, ahem, certain point of view. I look forward to watching them again soon.
Typically for Chibbers, this looks like a throw everything at the screen and hope something sticks affair. It's certainly more action orientated than some recent regeneration stories continuing Flux's style of multiple characters in various locations, stuff happening all over the place. Unlike Flux, I hope that the focus is squarely on the Doctor (unlike a lot of the previous three seasons when that hasn't always been the case) and that it wraps up whatever her story arc has been for the past three seasons.
Then, a few months after that, we're well into the show's 60th anniversary year even though the magnificent 50th was only ab0ut six months ago or something. Back then, I did the j-word and watched the whole of the series in order. This time, I'm going to spend as much of the year as I can catching up on all the spin-off stuff I haven't gotten to yet, the many hundreds of Big Finish I've bought and put to one side, all of those charity shop novels, work my way through the annuals, as well as rewatch everything since The Day of the Doctor which was the end goal last time.
TV "Giving a nod to BBC Three's sci-fi adventure Class. If you're part of the fandom you know where its at. Watch now on iPlayer." Why is BBC announcer Duncan Newmarch suddenly boosting the Doctor Who spin-off few people watched and those of us who did wondered why they'd bothered? Ending as it did on that cliffhanger, it's a bit of an oddity to be suddenly confronted by it at the close of the fifth episode of Flux as though it's a hint of something finally being resolved in the middle of everything else next week. Will it turn out that the Governors are a branch of the Division? Is April still stuck in the body of Corakinus, the Shadow King of the Shadow Kin and leader of the War of the Underneath? Class was a weird show and the fact it's part of the Doctor Who universe is even weirder.
No proper review of the episode this week. I'm knackered and Martin Belam over at The Guardian's done a bang up job of covering all the toings. But there are a couple of things I want to talk about and it's you or the wall so here's a couple of paragraphs. Like everyone in my Twitter timeline, I've been watching Get Back, Peter Jackson's exploration of the footage recording during the recording of The Beatles final couple of albums and amid the passive aggressive fun and mid-morning toast eating, there's a real message that noodling around with some unfinished ideas can be just as rewarding and useful as trying to create something which is fully formed from the start. At one point John Lennon sings the whole of Jealous Guy but with a different set of lyrics which are a non-starter.
To the point: can we calm down about The Timeless Child, please? If I see one more tweet or review suggesting that it's "ruining Doctor Who" and "destroying the series" with every new revelation treated as though its retroactive going to wreck our enjoyment of Timelash (as if that would ever be possible). Apart from the Doctor herself tonight giving enough escape clauses as to how her childhood self ended up at the bottom of that tower next to that vortex, the whole notion of her working for the Division just adds another layer of potential stories, just as the introduction of the Time Lords and their whole boring society increased the number of potential stories (for better or worse) and eventually gave Big Finish a reason to keep Lalla, Louise and John employed when Tom was too grumpy to co-operate.
I love it. Flux has now reached the point of absolutely batshit Virgin New Adventures, BBC Books, Big Finish, Doctor Who Magazine not giving a fuck in relation to adding to Doctor Who's origin myth, in other words when I became a fan, at the turn of the century and the programme wasn't even on the air. To suggest that this has nothing to do with Doctor Who, is to take a very television centric approach to the franchise (as opposed to television centre which has now been turned into flats) not to mention pretend that when Russell T and Moffat destroyed Gallifrey then didn't, they weren't doing much the same thing. You could make a similar argument that the Time War was much more interesting when we didn't know what happened, but did it really matter when we did?
Despite what Chris Chibnall is doing now, a new writer will be along soon to give us their own version and we know this because it's happened dozens of times before. It's right there in the opening sentence of the TARDIS Datacore entry about the early life of the Doctor: "There were a variety of different and contradictory accounts of the Doctor's early life before their travels with Susan." Throughout its life, even though the question of were the Time Lord comes from is literally in the title, Doctor Who has forever been using the revelation of the Doctor's origin as a story point with almost every iteration, especially in the Wilderness Years when there was a tendency to believe that it didn't really matter because the show was probably never coming back to television anyway.
It's pointless me creating a synopsis here when Tim Berners-Lee created hyperlinks so you can have a look yourself at how the "Timeless Child" origin is just one of a number of ways in which the Doctor came into being. A number of in-universe reasons for the variance are also offered, the key one being that "the many contradictory accounts of the Doctor's early life were equally and paradoxically true due to the Doctor's biodata being retroactively manipulated by a number of factors such as; Omega, Faction Paradox, subconscious regeneration influences and the impact of the Doctor's own adventures through time" (although to be fair a lot of that is the authors of the Eighth Doctor novels trying to tidy up what many of the same authors had been doing in the Virgin New Adventures.
Probably when the likes of Andrew Cartmel, Lance Parkin, Paul Cornell and Lawrence Miles were writing this stuff they too were receiving brickbats for trying to ruin the mystery. There's also little doubt that Doctor Who is usually at its most entertaining when the TARDIS lands somewhere, its inhabitants have an adventure which is consistent in and of itself and then leave after anywhere between one to thirteen episodes for another another one. But that only goes so far, especially with something of this longevity. Every now and then it has to do some existential stocktaking so that it can refresh its narrative shelves, refurbish itself a little and then re-open, especially when its under new management. That's all The Timeless Child is really, adding to the existing material, to the show we love.
TV There's a genre of Doctor Who story which can best be described as "It's all gone fucking mental!" (best said in your strongest Torchwood accent) in which the rules of characterisation, narrative and structure become irrelevant. True to form, Who ran headlong into this in only its third story with The Edge of Destruction and there were other examples as the classic series went on, The Mind Robber or whatever the sodding hell is going on in episodes five to eight of The Trial of a Time Lord. But it really found form in the spin-off media, especially in the Wilderness Years when writers wanting to stretch themselves or the franchise would present their story in the style of a history text book, the biography of a journalist or it turned out all the regular actors were actually playing giant insect aliens.
Every now and then the revival has a go and not for the first time the Chibnall era runs headlong into the surrealist thickets just to see if it can make it out the other side. Sadly, with Once, Upon Time, it found itself trapped, its jumper caught on the thorns, unable to stand up because its feet are wrapped around about a hundred vines (I speak from experience). There was a decent idea in there but as is often the case with this writer, his attention was so distracted by all of the expositional stuff he wanted to include that it just felt like having established a beginning and ending he wasn't quite sure how to execute the middle. So we had some pretty good bits of character work that he couldn't seem to fit elsewhere thrown together with the framing device of the Doctor floating around against a green screen talking to herself.
Village of the Angels reversed the polarity of that neutron flow (hah!) with an a thunderous episode filled with eyewatering images, solid old-school characterisation, edge of the seat scares and one hell of a cliffhanger. If Flux is anything, it's the Torchwood's Children of Earth of this era, the astonishingly good rejoinder to a previous middling couple of years. As I've said about the rest of this series, almost everything which was wrong with Jodie's first couple of season has been fixed, from a Doctor with agency and a need, to Yaz remembers she was once a police officer to a rich cast of supporting characters and a propulsive storytelling that's willing to take a few risks (even if last week that led to Alejandro Jodorowsky having a cheese dream after nodding off in front of DW Griffith's Intolerance).
The extent to whether in this episode it's as a result of Maxine Alderton or Chibbers we may never know, although you might suspect that anything in the village is hers and everything else is his. Although with his name in front of hers in the credits, perhaps his was more than a light polish. My guess is this was the only "guest" script nearing completion for the version of this series envisioned pre-COVID or even as a hold over from last year with the various Flux elements incorporated and Claire brought forward to appear in the opening and later instalments for extra continuity. Either way, when RTD is working on his next full series, he'd be silly not to engage the talents of Alderton in some capacity.
So The Division isn't some black ops operation working with the Time Lord's CIA as implied last season, but a intergalactic organisation along the lines of the Shadow Proclamation but with a much greater reach and the Doctor worked for them in some time before her increasingly shakily described first incarnation. Perhaps due to the Flux, she's being recalled, her new Weeping Angels form merely a type of stasis so they can transport her to who knows were. Whatever any of that means, it's a stonking cliffhanger which can't be resolved as easily as some with her friends trapped in another time period and as the trailer for next week's episode indicates for quite a while.
It's nearly a decade since the Weeping Angels had an episode title to themselves and all of the mythology established back then is utilised although its notable that it expects its audience to remember Amy's trauma in The Time of Angels and the result of her and Rory being zapped backward in The Angels Take Manhattan. With every episode available on the iPlayer seemingly in-perpetuity, there's assumption the audience will already know this stuff. That's some swagger. But, look, new stuff. The Doctor being able to communicate with an angel trapped within the mind of a human, have an actual conversation with them and without immediate loss of life. Give me a few months and I might have an answer as to how this ties in with the final episode of Class.
Leaving aside the continuing ludicrousness of the TARDIS team not taking it in turns to blink (a flaw pointed out by Steven Moffat himself in one of the episode commentaries), the notion of these creatures moving even in the darkness created by an eye movement is extremely troubling, especially when its deployed on someone who isn't aware of their power and doesn't know what to expect. Director Jamie Magnus Stone (bit of normative determination in the hiring there) wrings everything he can out of the darkness, making the most of the potential lighting possibilities of digital shooting by upping the blacks within the tunnels and around the village so that the angels are shrouded in complete darkness until they're not.
There was some chatter at the start of the season that in a casting reveal to end them all, Annabel Scholey's Claire would turn out to be Jodie's replacement such was the confidence of her performance and likeability within her opening few scenes. Once again we're presented with a character who we'd be comfortable spending a whole spin-off series with, a 2020s woman trapped in the 60s a time of huge cultural change perhaps investigating scientific mysteries sometimes caused by aliens aided by Kevin McNally's aging scientist scarred by war. She's cheeky, clever but also compassionate and I hope she makes it out of this alive enough to appear in several dozen boxsets for Big Finish.
If last week's episode suggested we'd reached the upper limits of John Bishop's acting parameters, he was on much firmer ground here, Dan swapping barbs with Yaz as she continued her WWTDD journey, even snapping at him when she'd heard quite enough of his expositing. Judging by the bits of interviews and set reports in the parish circular and elsewhere, it sounds as though Dan's not going to be appearing further than the Flux, either because he makes the kinds of sacrifices the Doctor's mates often do these days or he decides he'd rather return to his Liverpool home, or at least the plot of land where it used to be.
But it's the images which we'll be taking away with us. The Virgin New Adventures were supposed to offer stories, "Too Broad and Deep for the Small Screen" which was probably true in the early 90s. Now we have the Doctor negotiating for her memories on a pebbled jetty of the mind, her companions standing on the edge of a village floating in the cosmos and pensioners turning into stone then dust at the hands of living statues. There's a version of this which could have been shot using 80s or even 70s production techniques but there's clearly an attempt here to produce something which would work on Disney+ and even if the process shots containing Azure's head didn't quite come off (late additions?), we're Doctor Who fans. We have our megabyte-sized suspension of disbelief implanted at birth.
The only side characters tonight were the end credits shattering star-crossed lovers, with Thaddea Graham’s Bel (a descendant of the inventor of the telephone) (sorry) adding to the list of strong, adventurous women in this series in what amounted to a Short Trip, pitching up on a planet, sniffing out a fraud and saving at least single life. At one point I wondered if it's Bel who'll be revealed to be the next Doctor, but as far as we know RTD has had nothing to do with this era and it seems more likely he'd want to work from a clean plate (not to mention Jodie's said she doesn't know who her successor is going to be). Plus it would be a disservice to suggest the Doctor is the only person in the universe capable of this kind of deductive reasoning and extreme bravery when we know that's not true.
Next week looks just as exciting with the return of Kate Stewart in her first television appearance in six years. Big Finish'll be having a sale on UNIT stories next week then. Has UNIT been resurrected? Will Osgood be back too? How is she talking to the Grand Serpent and what's the TARDIS doing there? Freelancers are already turning out whole articles for websites on this subject as we speak but only those with access to preview streamers will know the answers before next week. In the meantime, let's all bask once again the special glow which comes a better than half decent episode being broadcast, hoping against hope that when Lizo tweets the viewing figures in the morning a few people watched it during broadcast as nature intended.
TV Goddammit, that was ruddy delightful. In this concluding episodes, Chibbers finally seems to know what to do with his era of Doctor Who and has turned out another propulsive, rich episode chock full of spectacle, rich characterisation and honestly just fun. If only in the past couple of seasons he'd been able to tap into the impressive writing ability on show here rather than the RTD-lite approach which blighted so much of the past couple of seasons (I refer you to the inevitable for reasons if you have a spare five and a quarter hours). Honestly, this is great.
This is also long. Until recently, an hour long episode was considered special and even called a special, but here we are on episode two of Doctor Who's Flux, after a fifty minute opener and a whole hour to play about with, the BBC One schedulers taking it in their stride. Perhaps there's a shorter "international" edit of the kind which used to be prepared for the likes of Spooks and the Upstairs Downstairs revival (some of which are still bouncing around on Netflix) but I'm not sure what you could possibly cut out.
After the initial cliffhanger resolution, the story bifurcates into three different eras and we're back to the classic model of splitting the Doctor and her companions so they can cover more story ground. The Chibnall era has tended to keep the fam together in a given situation which has led to some scenes feeling crowded with the companions barely getting a word in, and nothing much character defining. Not so here. Both the Doctor and Yaz benefit from their dislocation from each other, are much more clearly defined.
The promised Crimean war scenes are suitably spectacular, with a top down viewpoint of rival arms clashing into each other in a way which makes you wish the BBC would license someone to produce a real-time strategy game which allows you to pit various Who races against one another and historical armies (hopefully with less one sided outcomes than here). One professional reviewer labels this conflict "anaemic" (despite acknowledging the timeslot). Exceptthe point of the thing is to show the result, hundreds of pointless deaths, not some YA Battle of the Bastards.
This isn't the Doctor's first encounter with Mary Seacole. Perhaps as a result of time being out of joint, neither of them remember the events of the Twelfth Doctor's visit to the British Hotel as described in Big Finish's The Charge of the Night Brigade by David Llewellyn. Interestingly, that was released in February last year, eight months before shooting began on this season. Did that inspire this? Great minds? Or did whoever's covering branding now not let Big Finish know about all her appearance here? I'm always fascinated as to how these things work.
If the Chibnall era has been excellent at something, it's in its representation of female scientists and Seacole is another example. Played by Sara Powell, Big Finish veteran (but isn't every actor these days?), she takes everything which should be beyond her understanding in her stride, even when led onto her first alien spacecraft albeit having already accepted the existence of aliens, then having already conquered half of the planet. For all the substitution of a sick Sontaran, the script is able to illustrate her obligation to preserve all life.
Which contrasts with the Liverpool scenes, were many, many Sontarans meet a warrior's death. Any of my reservations about John Bishop have melted away. he's great. These regular returns to my locality are just hilarious, and particularly this evening as we see Liverpool city centre (Liverpool city centre!) infested with tater technology, Sontaran banners unfurling on the Liver Buildings. The explanation for how Dan's father learnt how to dismantle the alien thanks to a discovery by a pissed-up gentleman from Birkenhead gave me a good solid belly laugh.
Managing these tonal shifts is at the core of Doctor Who's DNA. One minute were watching the massacre of an army due to their leader's misguided patriotism, on the other a bewildered Liverpudlian attempting to destroy an entire Sontaran invasion fleet with a wok (because a frying pan would be less funny somehow?) aided by a humanoid terrier with loyalty issues. Remember when we all laughed at the photo of the Karvanista? He's become one of the franchises best characters in a long time.
Meanwhile Yaz meets a few of the characters we were introduced to last week in a heretofore unknown place which seems to act as a kind of surge protector for the time stream. Why did she end up there and not Sheffield? This is something which otherwise seemed to be the job of the Matrix on Gallifrey, but with that decimated by the Master, perhaps this popped into existence to act as an alternative. The Doctor's never 'eard of it and I'm hoping a clearly explanation of what it is will be forthcoming next week.
The idea of the lone companion using the Doctor's example when they themselves are in danger resonates with me, especially now. When Mum died, and many of you will have sadly had a similar experience with this, there was a lot of administration to take care of, from the funeral to the organising the death certificate to wills to cancelling her various accounts and cards and throughout, after watching her deal with such things for decades, I always asked, "What would Mum do?" and took strength from that. Honestly she was amazing, right up until her final moments.
Mum also told me not to dwell, so I won't. But when the Fraction Pillarbox belittled Yaz for taking a similar strength from her friend, it cut me to the core. Up until now, this era's mostly been to me about surface elements and deconstruction, but now it's actually making me feel in a way it hasn't before, despite the tragedy on show. Perhaps if, god forbid, I'd gone through this experience sooner, Grace's death would have affected me more, but there's something more insidious about watching the pre-meditated psychological damage on Yaz. Bullying essentially.
Another strong cliff hanger this week albeit of the transmogrification variety, a "Donna Noble has been Saved" or Peri's bald now and English. We still don't really know what the Flux really is or what Swarm and Azure want exactly, although they both also have the names of cloud computing services (here and here) so perhaps they're simply looking for somewhere secure to store a back-up of their corporate data given the end of the universe and wotnot.
Just another four episodes left. Can Chibbers sustain things through to the 5th December? The fact that I'm interested enough to review these episodes suggests there's more to chew on than before but does he have a proper ending? In the week, I tweeted that this might end up looking like a group of scripts originally prepared for a longer season but with what amounted to TARDISodes tenuously threaded through them but this second chapter suggest Flux is going to be far more intricate than that. Phew.
TV No, it was one of the Shabogans apparently. I've seen a few people on social media wondering who all of the people who were in the Doctor's memory blipvert in The Timeless Children so as a public service, here they all are.
TV Evening. Well, that was, as the teenagers say these days, a lot, wasn't it? The social medias are currently split between those of us who thought that was one of the best episodes in years, those who're angry about the revelations and those who say they didn't understand a word of it (which is frankly bizarre). That is absolutely fine and how it should be. It's rare that an episode stacked up with more retcon than Gwen Cooper after visiting the Torchwood Hub for the first time isn't going to be divisive especially when it's designed as this is to be a continuity generating machine. But I'm in danger of writing a review here so I'd best move on.
With tonight's episode, Chris Chibnall finally seemed like he'd realised why he wanted to be show runner in the first place. In this franchise of multitudes, Doctor Who is at its best when its allowing its authors to transform it into whatever they want it to be or what they think it should be, for better or worse. Up until now, one of the problems with his version of the show is that it's lacked an identity beyond not being what the other fellas have done. It's lacked a proper authorial voice and although we've had hints of it this series (which has led to an upturn in quality overall) it's not until tonight that it finally reached its apogee.
The Brain of Morbius would have been broadcast when ickle Chris was about five or six. Perhaps he watched it and if he did perhaps the famous scene of the Doctor seeing his earlier incarnations imprinted on his own brain. Or perhaps he caught up with it later on VHS or DVD, at the forefront of his mind even when he was facing down Pip and Jane and Patty Caldwell. The lack of a satisfactory explanation which didn't contravene established continuity gnawed at him, the notion that these were in fact earlier incarnations of the Gallifreyan war criminal for one thing not matching the intentions of the production team under Hinchcliffe.
Let's face it, given the choice, what else would you do if you were made show runner of your favourite TV show than use your power to tie up a continuity loose end from forty-four years ago? Not only that, not just to imply it, but to actually have sodding footage of the event in all of its upscaled standard definition videotape glory splattered across your super high definition frame as part of a montage sequence that blipverts all of the show's history in seconds and frames which are sure to be poured over for the days and weeks to come? Of everything CC has offered up in this past couple of series, this feels like the work of someone who's finally let themselves off the leash for better or worse.
All of which said, I really didn't think that while Chibnall was freebasing in Doctor Who's history that so much of what was put up on screen tonight would match my own doodlings from a few weeks ago. That the Doctor had indeed been sent on missions and at the end of all that her memory had been wiped and she'd been turned back into a Time Tot. Of course, with my limited imagination I assumed she'd had a whole previous single regenerative cycle although I reserve judgement on why the Jo Martin incarnation had a police box. I'm still quite attached to the idea that it was the machine trying to get her to remember these past lives, perhaps attempting to ease her into the trauma.
Where does The Timeless Children leave us now in terms of what we know about the Doctor? To summarise the episode: The Doctor is an entity which appeared in the Whoniverse (or whatever we're calling it) through a dimensional barrier who became a genetic source for the Time Lords and their ability to regenerate. She worked for a time in a forerunner to the Celestial Intervention Agency. Unlike what are now her adopted people, she apparently has an infinite number of regenerations, dozens of which happened before what she and us thought was her first incarnation. For some reason the past thirteen have been blokes but she had the capability to be either gender before that.
Like I said, a lot. Surprisingly none of this breaks canon, especially in the spin-off media where there have been multiple proposed origins anyway all of which has been explained in novels like Unnatural History and The Blue Angel as being a result of the Doctor's "biodata" having been manipulated by the likes of Omega and the Faction Paradox. Chibnall's new burst of incarnations also potentially explains the extra photographs inserted onto the walls of Clive's shed in Russell T Davies's Target adaptation of Rose featuring the likes of "a tall, black female Doctor who used a flaming sword and a young Doctor of indeterminate gender in a hi-tech wheelchair." If we want.
There's also the business of "the Other" although again nothing in the episode contracts that, with Chibnall's script carefully glossing over the invention of time travel, apparently accomplished (according to the penultimate Virgin New Adventure Lungbarrow) by this entity along with Rassilon and Omega (before he lost his head) (and the rest of his body). Lord know what Andrew Cartmel made of tonight's episode, although I do have a suspicion that both Steven and especially Russell are having a right old giggle about all of this, given that one of them inserted a new incarnation of the Doctor between some old ones and the other irrevocably destroyed Gallifrey for a second time.
Some breaking news. "The Brain of Morbius" is trending on Twitter. Having confirmed all of those guys into the canon, who else can we add? Sadly, the memory montage didn't go too far off-piste. But what's to say the Shalka Doctor isn't pre-Hartnell, especially since he was apparently being sent on missions? How about Merlin? The version who appears in Jim Mortimer's From Eternity? Big Finish now has scope to fill boxed sets with new incarnations of the Doctor played by whichever actor they please, with the Audio Visuals version also up for grabs not to mention whatever Bill Baggs was doing. Mr Magorium might as well be canon now. Not to mention the Cushing version. For goodness sake.
There's more to be said here, but I want to get back to feeding my Arrowverse addiction. As is right, apart from the Doctor being trapped in a prison on an asteroid, some things have been left hanging. It's suggested that she now remembers some of her pre-Hartnell life, but is it all of it? Does she know now who The Division was and the kinds of work she did for it? How much will these revelations impact on her going forward? Will she now want to discover what her actual origins are, try and find her true home planet? Will she ironically discover that she's the loan survivor of that too?
TV As you know, I'm not reviewing Doctor Who any more so I can't say whether I thought Sunday's episode, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, was any good or not. But it did open a canister full of giant maggots for us McGann fans since it takes place on exactly same night, in the same isolated house as when the Eighth Doctor met one of his greatest companion, Mary Shelley. Which as ever with such things leaves us to ponder - how can two stories happen in the same place at the same time from different eras?
For the initiated, for about ten years in the Big Finish audios, there was a running gag about the Doctor having traveled in time with the actual Mary Shelley. In 2009, a portmanteau release, A Company of Friends, featured companions from other media (Bernice Summerfield, Izzy Sinclair from the comics and Fritz from the books) and a story about Shelley. Soon afterwards we were gifted with three stories, The Silver Turk (featuring a Cyberman), The Witch From The Well and Army of Death which were fondly received. What happens now?
Few other franchises have this problem. The likes of Star Trek and Star Wars are pretty clear on their canonicity rules. The former that essentially anything filmed is canon (even The Animated Series these days) and anything else is a fun read. The latter I've covered at length somewhat elsewhere (although that piece was speculation on what would happen to the EU after Disney took over and in fact they dumped anything which wasn't filmed and started again). Let's not even get started on the Buffyverse.
Doctor Who's a special case (and stop me if I'm repeating myself) (like you can on this non-interactive page) because canonicity is in the eye of the viewer. Some take the Star Trek approach. Others anything performed (so TV and Big Finish). Some, like the writers of AHistory, include anything which fits neatly into the television continuity. Others like me consider everything canonical, including the TV Comic strips, whatever was going on in the World annuals in the seventies, the Cushing films and especially Dimensions in Time.
The fact that the Eighth Doctor directly references some of his Big Finish companions on screen during his regeneration scene (all hail Steven Moffat for that) pretty much puts those audios into the canon even if you're one of the conservative ones. He doesn't mention Mary, but then he doesn't mention the Griffins or anyone who turned up after that episode was filmed like Liv, Bliss or poor old Helen Sinclair. Nevertheless given that Mary was mentioned in a story featuring one of the regeneration mentions, she counts too.
So how do we square the fact that the Thirteenth Doctor and the fam turned up and had an adventure on the same night as the Eighth Doctor did in the Mary's Story audio before scooping her up and heading off into an adventure and with a slightly different characterisation to the one we saw on screen? The obvious answer would be the Time War, which is how AHistory ultimately rationalises there being two stories called Human Nature which have roughly the same narratives featuring two different Doctors.
Except, frankly, wiping the Eighth Doctor's Mary Shelley stories from the timeline is unacceptable. Utilizing the Time War or Faction Paradox or the crack on Amy Pond's wall when she was seven years old always feels like a cop out especially if the idea is that it erases the adventure completely to the extent that the Doctor himself doesn't even remember it for reasons other than living two thousand years and having to take a second or long enough to create some jeopardy in a flagging story line to recollect it.
In which case it's perfectly fine for the Thirteenth Doctor to not remember the earlier adventure. There's been a lot of hydrogen floating through the Crab Nebulas since then. Plus there's whole sections of my own life I haven't the foggiest about. Some people seem to be able to remember their childhood with total clarity. I can barely remember the 70s and I lived there for six whole years and the early 80s are almost completely gone too these days. So I can sympathise with the Doctor in this regard.
But how did both stories happen and in what order? Twitter user @fantasticalicef offers the following utterly brilliant suggestion:
Not only does this explain the whole business of having two Eighth Doctors land during Mary's Story, but also why Thirteenth doesn't remember, for the reason which is often the case when various incarnations bump into each other, as per Day of the Doctor.
Except the people in the house, notably Mary Shelley fail to mention the events of the night before to the early or late era Eighth Doctors. At the beginning of the series, the Doctor gave the people she'd met along the way some of the old Donna Noble treatment and erased their memories (something hasn't oddly done since). So it's entirely possible that some time between this shot:
And this shot:
She popped back and gave everyone the whammy so they wouldn't remember the events of that day (and wonder what happened to the help) ready for Eighth to turn up and throw them back into another similarly terrifying adventure with Mary eventually receiving her Frankenstein inspiration from a different Cyberman. But of course there's nothing in the episode to suggest that's what she did so perhaps we could stick with the idea that the storm fried their brains too.
None of this is perfect, because of course it isn't, but I'm certainly not part of the crowd which Paul Kirkley mentions in his superb Guardian piece about fickle fandom who are apparently using the discrepancy as another excuse to slam a show which has much improved in its second season with only one properly duff episode and there's always at least one of those in every season, the drama equivalent of your tonsils, absorbing the infection of poor quality writing from elsewhere.
Ultimately it's all about stories, it's all just one long fairy tale and to an extent if you start to try to make everything fit together you're taking away some of the magic (even if it is a fascinating intellectual exercise for those of us who want to add to the fiction without having any talent). The Doctor says history is swirling around her and in a season which looks to be in the process of making huge changes to the overall premise of the franchise again (will it be looms?) how these two stories fit together should be the least of our fanxiety.
TV Apologies if the following rambles like an Oscar acceptance speech, but I was up last night watching the 92nd Academy Awards and feel something akin to jet lag. In order to prepare for the festivities, I slept through the evening including Doctor Who so didn't catch up with the episode until just before midnight, which does at least mean my viewing on the iPlayer will actually be counted into the ratings rather than just nebulously implied due to my proximity to someone who has a BARB box (or however that works).
Although this isn't a review, there is something I wanted to address about Can You Here Me? on which there's been some discussion since broadcast, the short scene in the console room towards the end when Graham describes his background fear of a recurrence of his cancer. It's economically written and played by Bradley Walsh which makes it all the more heartbreaking in an episode which has a ton of similar moments that do much to flesh out the background of the fam, notably Yasmin after numerous episodes.
The controversy (because everything is controversy these days) stems from the Doctor's response to Graham's confession which is to point out that she's socially awkward and so essentially unable to offer any words of wisdom. Anger has ranged from the notion that the scene is making fun of cancer (it isn't) and that the Doctor comes across as heartless in her response which is out of character (tiny sigh for those of us who lived through season eight) and reflects badly on her as a role model for children.
All of which is nonsense. For the most part, the Doctor has always been a socially awkward entity, rarely able to deal with the tragedy of humans on an interpersonal level which is often makes such incidents all the more poignant. Everyone sobs at the regeneration scene in Logopolis, but few mention when the Doctor comforts Tegan on the death of her aunt, Tom faltering through his apology, knowing full well that it isn't enough.
Perhaps people were expecting a Tomb or chops and gravy. But both of those conversations are somewhat practical, about keeping someone together within a crisis. The Doctor's often been good at that because it's part of her overall calculation about working towards a goal, keeping the human spirits up so that they're not hopeless in the face of whatever danger is about to befall them. But that's osculated over time depending on the situation. Tenth fails that test in Midnight.
Not mention that it's not that kind of scene. The crisis is over. This is general existential angst and the Doctor's never been very good at that. She doesn't do domestic and even in her most benevolent incarnations often misunderstands or switches out of the conversation. It's precisely because of this that numerous companions have left the TARDIS voluntarily. Although this Time Lady is very good and physically saving his companions, baring odd examples, she's usually been rubbish at maintaining their emotional well being.
In other words, she's entirely in character here, both for this incarnation and the Doctor in general, the exception being that she reminds Graham that she is socially awkward which is why she doesn't know what to say to him. Her way of consoling him is to visit the console and let him into the secret of why she sometimes stands over it, she doesn't know what to say straight away but is waiting for something useful to bubble up to the top of the raging volcano of ideas in her head.
Plus even though she is a Time Lady and I'm decidedly not, I can relate to the notion of being socially awkward and so consequently dumbstruck in the face of difficult conversations. Sometimes I've found myself on the other side of just these sorts of confessionals and have little to no idea what to say, because what can you say which isn't pre-programmed or faux reassurance? It's one of the reasons I was also reluctant to tell people about my anxiety at the beginning, not wanting to put them in the same situation.
Thinking about it now, my strategies tend to be misdirection, distraction or listening, to change the subject, ask them about something else or to just just allow them to talk at me until they've said everything they need to. If I'm really stuck, I'll actually make an excuse about needing to be somewhere else or being in the middle of something. That could equally be construed as heartless, but when you're an awkward one or have self esteem issues, you're also afraid of saying something which might make it worse.
In other words, don't judge the Doctor too harshly here. Apart from anything else, she's dealing with her own personal apocalypse and trying not to show it and unable to really talk about it herself. But we also forget too easily that no matter what she looks like on the outside, she's an alien and although she's one of the more benevolent and compassionate examples of her species it doesn't necessarily mean that those emotional states will manifest themselves as they would for us humans. Or some of us at least.
TV For the past week I've been fiddling around with a Spotify playlist of hit songs in their original iterations, most of which aren't typically known for being the cover version that they are. So we have Bonnie Tyler's If I Could Turn Back Time, I-Ten's Alone and Isley, Jasper, Isley's Caravan of Love. Some of them are theoretically better than their successors, others found their proper muse in the rerecord. While World Party's She's The One became Robbie Williams's passionless clone, Labi Siffr's It Must Be Love is fine but Madness made it a stellar undertaking for the ears.
Which brings us to tonight's Doctor Who and the revelation that the Doctor is the Doctor but that there was an earlier Doctor who might be from her past who is also the Doctor. The Doctor's reaction to this was rather the same as when we discovered that Torn by Natalie Imbruglia wasn't just a cover version, it was a cover version of about three different songs one of which is Danish and called Burned instead. It's The Grudge or Ringu of Scandipop. Confused? Imagine how my brain was as it parsed through the possibilities of who this new incarnation of the Doctor is and why she exists.
The franchise has toyed with the notion of pre-Hartnell Whos before. On television, greet all of the production team faces pulled from Baker T's consciousness in The Brain of Morbius, most often rationalised as being the previous lives of the antagonist, when what Robert Holmes et al were getting at is pretty clear. The Wilderness years promoted the idea of the Other who along with Rassilon and Omega founded Time Lord society and eventually became the Doctor after being "re-loomed". The Wilderness Years were a strange place. Even the Doctor seems to have forgotten she destroyed Gallifrey herself back then.
What if it's more complicated than that? What if we're entering Unbound territory and she's actually from an alternate reality? What if Jo Martin's incarnation is from a different dimension, or else that the Doctor herself and her family have entered that alternative reality at some point, perhaps in the aftermath of an earlier story, but just haven't noticed. Which would explain the dissolution of UNIT and Torchwood being a revelation to her and why this version of the Master seemed to run counter to what we know about the person and their fate at the close of Capaldi's final season.
But it's that kind of episode and how great that we've finally landed here with a story which finds the sweet spot of Daviesy Moffat revelation and question, stuffed with continuity references and a general sense of finally feeling like its part of the same show we've enjoyed since at least 2005, rather than the nervy disjointed stranger taking a fag break in the alleyway round back. A continuity dump chock full of more back references than a Big Finish McGann boxset perhaps, but it's entirely pleasurable to see Jodie actually being the protagonist of her own show again and more's the point being that Time Lord with its past.
Although the social media publicity beforehand said enough that we knew the Judoon would be a sideshow in tonight's story and that someone would be returning, to then offer up Captain Jack Harkness as a secondary red herring is really ballsy. Barrowman bloody loves this stuff so it's also a pleasure to see that he didn't do or say anything to invalidate James Goss's intricate audio continuity so it's entirely open as to whether this is happening during any of his sojourns off-Earth. I'll leave it to costume nerds to work their magic on any clues there. But Captain Jack's back and will no doubt be back again. Squee.
This is in danger of becoming a proper review of the kind I said I wouldn't write any more instead of a fangasm so I'd better stop in the next paragraph. There's dishes to wash and I need to get ready for visiting Lichfield tomorrow (which amounts to making sure my phone and iPod are charging and remembering to put my Arden 3 copy of King John in my bag to read on the train). I booked this trip during a atmospherically mild moment last November, little thinking that January would be this horrible. The only good news from the BBC Weather page is a 15% chance of precipitation. But the wind chill is 3 degrees centigrade. Brrr.
Anyway, it's just a pleasure to be able to sit in front of Doctor Who for once and it not feel like the franchise's equivalent of the liquid dispensed by Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser to Arthur Dent on the Heart of Gold. On the one hand it could be seen as a retreat from the grand experiment in Jodie's first season but on the other it's the sort of thing which brings in the punters. There's a reason Shakespeare's arguably most derivative play is called As You Like It. Enjoy the rest of the evening. Let me end on one final revelation. Young at Heart by The Bluebells was originally recorded by Banarama. The walls of reality are truly crumbling.
TV OK, fuck it. On Sunday afternoon I offered a few tweets suggesting I wasn't going to review that night's episode of Doctor Who. That it would be good just to sit and watch it without having one eye on the ensuing review. Well, friends, I've tried. I have. Look, it's even the middle of the week. But damnit, the problem with being handed an episode as ruddy awful as Orphan 55, is that it generates opinions and they sit rattle around in your brain desperate to get out. So here we all are. It's Tuesday night and I'm typing away at 10:15pm while Google Photos syncs with my phone. As Mark Kermode says on the Friday film programme he contributes to when some listener writes in to talk about the spiritual journey which resulted from them seeing some turd he had a good rant about the week before, "I'm very pleased that you enjoyed it but I disagree." If you liked Orphan 55, good for you. My first review of Fear Her was positive too.
It's not just that Orphan 55 doesn't work as an episode. It's a comprehensive thesis on what's gone wrong with television Doctor Who in general. Spyfall suggested an upswing in quality. with the current producers having some sense in what wasn't working after their first season. But this almost felt like they'd read my year end survey and done the exact opposite. We're back to the gossamer version of the Thirteenth Doctor with generic Doctor dialogue including insults which seem more suited to her predecessor, her only true emotional beat when her friends notice she's slightly out of sorts after last week's episode. Once again we have a handful of underwritten characters because the script has to also service an overcrowded TARDIS in a limited episode duration and the Doctor also spends a lot of the episode reacting and offering explanations for stuff. Plus some hopelessly generic rubber monsters lumbering around, their lighting trolling Mat Irvine with its illumination.
Accusing Doctor Who of cliche, as we've discussed before, is a bit of a non-starter. Like most long running sci-fi franchises, it's forever eating its own narrative tails. But jesus, another one about the Doctor going on holiday by mistake? In an oasis-like resort on an otherwise desolate planet? Where everything goes wrong? And everyone on the TARDIS crew is surprised including the Doctor. Part of the artifice of the show to be sure, but having sat through the equally subpar Nightmare in Silver, another episode which has its fans (mostly fans of its author) but is equally bobbins, I have to wonder, has the Doctor ever had a vacation when everything went right? True, we wouldn't necessarily want to sit through fifty odd minutes of the Doctor and her fam on sun loungers flirting with each other, but given what ranks as a ratings success on ITV these days, it would at least look like part of the zeitgeist.
The show's second crime - the underutilisation of Laura Fraser. Regular readers will know that for years I've been desperate for the star of Virtual Sexuality to appear on Doctor Who. Way back, given her association with RTD following luminous turn on Casanova, that she might have been Billie or Freema's replacement or turned up as a one off companion in 2009, but then time took over and always looked doubtful and now here she is playing generic security officer with a secret, mostly called upon to frown or look guilty for the half hour she's in the episode. Fraser does this very well, but she's so much better than this material, as are all of the guest cast. I was never a fan of The Inbetweeners, but it's pretty clear that James Buckley is a pretty big hire and yet he spends most of the thing being a rubbish mechanic who doesn't listen to his son. In a green wig.
The problem is, like I said, the duration of the story isn't long enough to develop the characters beyond the thinnest of stock elements because so much time is spent with the regular companions. Back in the old plus one days, remember how even what should be a fairly bland character like Father Octavian in Flesh and Stone received the incredibly poignant death scene because somehow amid the many dispirit elements we understood where he was coming from? That's because between the Doctor, Amy and River we spent time with him amid the shouting. Granted thumb sucking Bella resonates more here because of her interactions with Ryan, but do we truly care when she dies having been handed the hoariest of old family familiarity twists? Apart from anything else, do we need another Ryan-centric story like this when Yaz is still right there? Having three extras was fine in the Hartnell and Davison eras because of story duration. Now it squeezes everything else out.
But it doesn't help that the supporting characters aren't especially well written. One of the most fondly remembered characters since 2005 is Raffalo, the blue maintenance engineer in The End of the World and she only appeared in one scene which was only included because the episode was underunning. Like Rose, she came from the service industry end of the workforce and illustrated to the companion that such social issues still existed in the far future. It's unfair perhaps to compare Russell T Davies to someone who's only previous screen credits were a couple of episodes of Skins and otherwise mostly in theatre were he seems to have directed more than written but It Takes You Away was my favourite episode of last year so it's a shame to see Ed Hime lose it so conclusively here. Luthor writer Neil Cross gave us both The Rings of Arkanoid and Hide so no one's perfect, but the character work feels like a first draft which has been rushed into production before anyone has had a proper thought about how they fit and reflect the overall story.
An example of how poorly this develops is in the couple of Vilma and her husband Benni. You know what I'm going to say here. In a scene which glances towards and RTD script, Yaz cluelessly interrupts Benni's proposal but beyond that we barely have much time with him before he's offed off screen after a death plea. Despite the best efforts of Vilma actress Julia Foster (who I know best from playing Margaret of Anjou in Jane Howell's stunning BBC Television Shakespeare version of the Second Henriad back in the 80s) because we don't know (a) what exactly has been happening with the very much not aliens and (b) haven't seen him for most of the story, the moment doesn't land. There's plenty here and elsewhere to suggest that the episode overran considerably and plenty of connecting tissue in character terms went missing in the cut in favour of the often poorly structured action sequences (it's getting late).
But back to (what there is of) the story. It's probably unfortunate that Trial of a Time Lord was re-released just a few months ago and it's probably pretty ambitious to assume that a lot of the kids watching will have seen The Mysterious Planet and made the connection between Ravalox and this hunk of dirt but surely a few more of them will have been working their way through the rest of nuWho now its available perpetually on the iPlayer and Netflix and wondered whether humanity develops into these dregs (gettit?) before or after they've become the Toclafane. Like the destruction of Atlantis, the fate of humanity is one of Doctor Who's returning story ideas, but to go back there in such a perfunctory manner doesn't do us or the message of the episode any favours. Tellingly the TARDIS Databank episode for Humans hasn't been updated with this new data yet and but does find room for the Faction Paradox spin-offs.
Then, oh god, the final speech. Now, I've seen this called the Thirteenth's iconic moment and its true, Doctor Who has had its spade naming orations when the subtext becomes text. But the reason the likes of "When you've killed all the bad buys ..." speech from The Zygon Inversion work is because they're usually addressing an antagonist and are part of the Doctor's own battle. After an episode when the environmentalist themes have already been enunciated as best they can under the circumstances, this Gallifreyan TEDx talk felt about as natural as Tasha Yar's drugs are bad PSA to Wesley in TNG's Symbiosis. As Paul Whitelaw tweeted yesterday, "The problem with last night's Doctor Who wasn't that it made a political statement - Doctor Who has done that numerous times since the early '70s. The problem was this: an inarguably sound message about climate change was crudely tacked on to an absolute shambles of an episode." Rosa feels a universe away.
Weirdly the one element of the speech I have less of a problem is how this global catastrophe can be averted. As we heard over and again in the Moffat era, time can be rewritten. There have been divergent moments like Cold Blood which almost cause global repercussions not to mention "Doesn't she look tired" wiping out a golden age for UK politics and heralding in Saxon as well as the wasteland the Doctor presents to Sarah Jane in Pyramids of Mars before they brazen their way into winning. We know the planet blows up anyway some time after it becomes Ravalox. I've been arguing for years that the universe reboots itself every time a TARDIS lands and the Doctor opens the door so what we saw in Orphan 55 is one possible future, although I'm not sure what the Doctor's three friends can specifically do themselves. Perhaps Jodie should have just broken the fourth wall and been done with it. Night, night.
TVAHistory: An Unauthorised History of the Doctor Who Universe 4th Edition Volume 2 has this to say on the subject of the origin of the Time Lords. It says, "The history of the Time Lords and their homeworld of Gallifrey was shrouded in mystery. The Time Lords knew little of their own past, and much of what was known was cloaked in uncertainty and self-contradiction. It is extremely difficult to reconcile the various accounts of the origins of the Time Lords. The authorities suppressed politically inconvenient facts, although few Time Lords were very interested in politics anyway." From there it offers a few pointers about how simple hard working Gallifreyans became time travellers, much of it sourced from The Deadly Assassin, The Five Doctors, Lungbarrow what seems like some pretty wild storytelling in the Titan Tenth Doctor comics, none of which really says anything which isn't common sense or knowledge.
So when the Master tells the Doctor everything she knows was a lie what he means is whatever fairy tale the Time Lords passed along to Time Tots to explain their existence, the Celestial Intervention Agency or whoever having classified the secret origins. Whatever it these are apparently has apparently been enough for the Master to destroy Gallifrey again ("Gallifrey falls no more." "Weeeelll....") so that's a lot for the writers to live up to by the end of this series, whatever "the timeless child" is. Given the pretty gonzo stuff threaded through the spin-off material, your guess is as good as mine. But after a pretty vanilla approach to the mythology last year, here we are slap bang in the middle Gallifreyan politics again and the Doctor not even knowing her own origin and although this became a bit tiresome in the Eighth Doctor audios, frankly some of the revivals best stories have revolved around this nonsense so that's all to the good.
The continuing course correction on display in the second half of Spyfall is pretty crazy. Separating the Doctor from the fam allows both groups to breath. Finally we see the Fifteenth version (if you use the metric system) in full flow with lashings of agency discovering the horrors of the Master's plan and experiencing her first post-regenerative existential crisis, the audience just allowed to be with her alone in the TARDIS (for the most part) as she considers her immediate future and the fact that she will indeed have to somewhat explain who she is to her friends. The TARDIS crew also flourish in their own mini-adventure, redolent of episodes when Jamie and Zoe or Amy and Rory would find themselves sans a Time Lord and still commit to whatever mission has been initiated. Perhaps between her experiences in the other realm and the Grahan and Ryan storyline last year, Yaz will get more of the spotlight this time.
This continues to be an iteration of the show on a grand scale, the Doctor buzzing around in time investigating the mystery of the spies-unlike-us offering us two celebrity historicals for the price of one. Already online (well alright Twitter) I've seen a complaint about Ada being introduced as Lord Byron's progeny, but that was just context, the Doctor spending the rest of the episode underscoring the future Lovelace's achievements, the direction and writing of her introductory scenes redressing the heinous historical crime which put Babbage front and centre, anonymising her achievements. His sexist attitude draws withering looks from the two female scientists. Throughout I thought about friend of the blog Suw Charman-Anderson, who has done much to telegraph Lovelace's contribution and women in STEM in general through Ada Lovelace Day which was ten years old last year. If anything, this episode is also a tribute to Suw and her colleagues.
A few years into the future and we greet Noor Inayat Khan, Codename Madeline, sometimes Nora Baker someone I hadn't come across, demonstrating the show's continued willingness to be a source of education as well as excitement. The script perhaps has less time to underscore her historical importance, but fortunately the Extradential wing of the partyhave published a video detailing both of her biography (along with "Lovelace"). In these fractious times, it's just so right that this silly Sunday night sci-fi series should be front and centre in reminding public the contribution that people of colour have made to our country's history especially at times which have become steeped in nationalistic jingoism. What the episode doesn't tell us for understandable reasons given the timeslot, is beyond her legacy and posthumous George Cross, Khan personally had no future. A year after her part of the episode is set, she and three other agents were taken to Dachau and executed.
Would the Doctor have known this? Probably. But this is an occasion when the often sunnier disposition of this incarnation is finally eclipsed by the darkness that's usually at her hearts. Noor seemed to accept the removal of her memories, but Ada's protestations remind us of Donna's pleading, the Time Lord removing these glorious memories for the protection of the time stream. Again, this is the writer embracing the rich history of the show returning the Doctor to the context which felt missing in the last season and alienated some fans. If anything its really a shift from the classical approach of last season when the Doctor was an enigma to some degree and barely talked about her feelings to the revival approach of making her loneliness a defining characteristic. Both are somewhat valid approaches, but the latter provides a connection to those watching, gives us something to latch onto emotionally across shorter episode and season lengths.
In the middle of all that, the resolution of the alien invasion plot is the least interesting element, a reiteration of The Sarah Jane Adventures's Invasion of the Bane and a dozen other stories. Lenny Henry's Barton really has little do here other than murder his own mother (which is a pretty big step admittedly) and give a TED Talk on the dangers of sharing personal information online for kids not yet old enough to watch films like Antitrust, The Circle, The Social Network or Carole Cadwalladr's actual TED Talk. Don't do it or you're likely to get a push notification that will try to rewrite your DNA or as is the case in the re-world your political biases. Plus there's a huge amount of Moffaty sleight of hand utilised by the Doctor to save her friends and end the invasion. Blinovitch would have if fit if he saw this. There's a reason why the Doctor doesn't visit the future, discover how the aliens won then drop back in time again to use it against them. It's anti-dramatic.
And did Sacha Dhawan's Master live up to his initial promise? Yes, very much so. Impetuous and devious with a fine line in monologuing, we're back to the old scheme of tantalising the Doctor only to Lucy the American football away at the last moment every ... single ... time. Dhawan so far seems slightly more comfortable with the larger character based scenes than the cogs and springs of the plot, but there are definitely shades of Ainley as his betrayal of the extra-dimensional spies catches up with him. Fans of my vintage will have been hanging on every word during the Eiffel Tower sequence, although it was odd that they slipped in a Logopolis reference rather than something from City of Death (especially since it was taking place in a period when Paris was literally just that). Neither of them mention the events experienced by their immediate previous incarnations, but perhaps that is the Time Lord way, times change and so do they, different people all through their lives.
Much as I enjoyed Jodie's first season, it never did quite gel and in that respect both parts of Spyfall indicate a dramatic return to form. The deep dive back into the mythology of the show will concern some and probably doesn't have same impact as it perhaps did in 2005 for those of us still knee deep in the wilderness years and requiring RTD in DWM to explain that that in fact his destruction of Gallifrey isn't the same as the one from the The Ancestor Cell novel, even if AHistory later acknowledges this but offers numerous reasons why they might be the same event from different points of view and doesn't the Grandfather Paradox look like the War Doctor (Ninth in earlier editions), he's is wearing a leather jacket, isn't he? God, I loved this story and somehow I've got to the end of nine paragraphs before mentioning Graham's shoes. So here's a mention for Graham's shoes. Graham's shoes are very funny. See you next week.
TV Happy New Year! Blimey, blimey, blimey, blimey, blimey. Did I see that coming? Put it this way, as the fam were arriving at the casino party, I was guessing that the big shock would be that Graham and Ryan would be leaving at the end of the story (Sheffield 2020!) with O revealing his full name and joining the Doctor and Yas as the new companion. Instead, somehow, in this social media saturated environment and despite the preview screening at the BFI we have this Masterful reveal of such audacity that even as Adele thrums along in the background as I write, I still don't quite believe it and am looking for reasons why this might be a bluff, that it isn't quite the Master.
Up until that point Spyfall is an above average example of a Doctor Who romp in the Chibnall era referencing on a modern genre. It's fine. There are riffs on the gadgets and gambling and the other furniture of the Bond films wrapped up in a slightly tortured explanation as to why MI6 are investigating this alien threat because for reasons I hope are explained more thoroughly UNIT and Torchwood have folded ("The Twenty-first Century is when everything changes and we gotta be ready .... so long as our funding remains intact ..."). Who's in charge of the Black Archive now? The Zygon refugees? Sorry, I seem to have strayed off point and it's only the second paragraph.
The apparently trans-dimensional aliens are pretty intriguing fodder, their brilliant white form almost luminous enough to create screen burn, their basic silhouette somewhat giving away the notion that they're spies from another universe. Who are they? Chibnall's clever enough on this occasion to keep that reveal until the second half of the story which is just the sort of thing you can do when you're making stories with multiple episodes. If they're not a manifestation of the Faction Paradox or the Toclafane, they're probably something entirely new. Unless they're the Cybermen from Pete's World again ("Listen to me Den Watts. I don't care if you have come back from the grave, get out of my pub!"). Or they're just killer dandruff from the planet Hairfollical.
The biggest surprise is the scale. Where once, three chunks of studio floor and ingenious set design would allow the Doctor and his companions to criss-cross the globe now the show's budget seems to be able to stretch to feature a dozen locations worthy of a Futura Extra Bold caption, even if a couple were probably filmed on consecutive days in South Africa. This is now a show with the confidence to hire Stephen Fry for what pre-publicity implied would be a huge role only to have him killed off very early on. Even the Davies era, having a Fry in the cast would be more than enough but here Lenny Henry too as the false antagonist. As far as we can tell.
There's also numerous course corrections. The Doctor has far more agency within scenes, proper close-ups without quite so many moments in which the focus remains on the reaction of her friends to her goofiness. Unlike previous stories, the characters bifurcate into their own storylines rather than all following a single narrative thread, albeit motivated by a mission mentality rather than because of a kidnapping or poorly timed forcefield or some such. Chris Chibnall's writing has also become fairly self aware, with amongst other things Graham's tendency to narrate everything enunciated and actually being unembarrassed to point out the Doctor is a woman now ("Don't be ridiculous Franklin, I've read the files. The Doctor is a Man." "I've had an upgrade. Hi.").
But then, stellar. Absolutely fandabidozi. Everything about the introduction of this new incarnation of the Master is machine tooled for maximum effect. Sacha Dhawan is already a fan favourite thanks to frequent collaboration with Mark Gatiss, notably his casting as Waris Hussein in An Adventure in Space and Time, so having him as the surprise special guest already seems like a big enough post-Christmas present. Locking him into the story as a previous acquaintance of the Doctor during some unseen adventure further transports him into the friend's zone. Did anyone else spend half their time trying to remember if Dharwan had indeed appeared as this character in some previous story in such a minor role that we'd forgotten?
My favourite part of the reveal is that the Doctor's only at about stage one of her suspicion and the Master just assumed she'll get there eventually so why wait? As with Missy, it's not entirely clear how he's able to mask his identity given that Time Lords are supposed have a "feeling", but that's been less than a vague notion since his completely new regenerative cycle. Plus we haven't yet had an explanation as to how he survived the ark ship at the close of business on The Doctor Falls, how he was able to regenerate and how he managed to take O's form and in some ways I don't want to know. One of the best elements of the classic series was that the Master just survived. How exactly he got out of Castrovalva, the Planet of the Ogrons or Lanzarote was besides the point.
While Davos in Iron Fist called upon Dhawan to give a rather one-dimensional callousness which wouldn't necessarily suggest him as an obvious replacement for Michelle Gomez (assuming he isn't some earlier previously unseen incarnation), his performance is extraordinary, channeling the manic camp energy of Ainley and Simm (and Jacobi in the audios) rather than the avuncular logic of Delgado. It's early days, but arguably these few minutes are as ballsy and rewatchable as Tennant's introduction as the Doctor during The Christmas Invasion, so brilliantly does he nail the lunacy of the character. Now that the jellicle has the escaped the receptacle, I can't wait for him and Jodie to be properly locking their Northern vowel sounds.
Is he a Master from an alternative universe, rather like Mark Gatiss in the Big Finish Unbound episodes with the various earths overlapping with one another an indication of some kind of multiversal crisis? That would explain why the Doctor doesn't sense his presence. When he says to her "Everything you think you know .... is a lie ..." does he mean since the start of this story or earlier? Was she already in some kind of alternative reality were UNIT and Torchwood had much less influence anyway? Or is it simply that Yas has been replaced by an imposter or sleeper agent? Will all of this be resolved in the next episode or are we going to have a season long arc? Wow.
TV Here we are then at the close of another year of Doctor Who. If you've been following my reviews over the past few months, you'll know that having enjoyed this past series, I've sometimes sounded a bit forced. Partly its because after having been writing these amateur texts for the past thirteen years it's becoming increasingly difficult to find a new way of expressing myself and sometimes having to force myself to have an opinion even if it's a shrug emoji.
But there's also been something niggling at the back of my nod about why this hasn't quite gelled sometimes in a way that was obvious even in the odd episode of the otherwise horrendous series eight. During series eight, I grokked pretty quickly what I didn't like about its portrayal of the Doctor, but with series eleven, because I've been genuinely positive overall about the thing, it isn't until now I've been able to articulate what isn't quite working.
Some caveats. The following is not a blame game or anger for the sake of it directed at anyone in the cast or indeed the writers. There's obviously a particular approach which has been taken with the series, so some of this probably due to personal taste. Everything which follows comes from a place of love. It's a bit like those moments when The Daily Show with Jon Stewart would do a piece about Obama when they thought something had gone amiss.
The nub of the problem is this. Much of what we understand about the Thirteenth Doctor is from Jodie's portrayal. If you try to dispassionately listen the text she's been given and the character she's playing it's largely in the realm of the so-called generic Doctor who often turns up in spin-off fiction when a writer, usually someone who isn't a fan, tells the story of a kind of quirky magician who really doesn't have a relationship to the incarnation which is supposed to striding across the pages.
The most obvious examples of this can be found in Eighth Doctor material either from the period in the novels when his character was only just in the process of formation amongst writers who only had the TV Movie as their source material, or in later years when those who don't seem to be steeped his deep multi-media history have been commissioned to write a story for him. Alex Scarrow's Spore is a decent example of this.
Now I appreciate that to some extent as Terrance Dicks has said, the Doctor doesn't change and its about what the actors bring to it, and Jodie brings a tremendous amount. But every version of the Doctor, even in the writing, has a specific interior life or set of behaviors which the audience can relish or not and this shifts over time depending on the writers (the Tom of season twelve is a very different figure to Tom in season eighteen).
But there are numerous choices which are working against her, which stop her burning as brightly as she should, which take the edge off her individuality, which stop us from becoming entirely involved with her story. Essentially this boils down to the companions and lack of returning elements outside of the core premise related stuff which can't not be part of the adventures. There's a reason why the Third Doctor was given his TARDIS back so soon.
Initially I enjoyed having multiple companions in the TARDIS, the fam, because it allows for multiple points of view on a story from varying experiences. They're all compelling characters well played, even taking into account how underwritten Yaz so often is. Even in the two episodes which are notionally supposed to be about her and her family, the story material shifts pretty sharply to other concerns.
On the one hand can you can compare this to the original TARDIS team and gang who accompanied the Fifth Doctor. Except stories were told across a far longer duration which meant that there was plenty of time to service all the characters for the most part (poor Nyssa) and give the Doctor a fair shake of the action. Plus having more companions increased the storyline's direct connection to the Doctor and increased the stakes.
The problem with having this many characters in a much smaller episode duration is that its rare that every character has something meaningful to do and also that the number of supporting characters decreases which potentially lessens the sense of place. Again this isn't true of all stories - the historical pieces in particular are very well drawn. But watch how many subplots are between companions rather than a companion and a day player.
The knock on effect of this is to give the Doctor less to do. Notice how often the story elements which are usually the Doctor's responsibility are handed off to the other characters reducing her "moments of charm". Graham is utilised as the voice of experience even though she's at least a couple of millennia older than him. On numerous occasions Yaz or Ryan are off investigating whilst the Doctor is stuck in a room somewhere doing science or investigation.
It's only when Jodie is alone and interacting with a stranger, usually an antagonist, that she really glows because she's finally allowed to be the focus of the scene, its not about the other characters reacting to her behaviour. The Dalek in Resolution. The Frog in It Takes You Away. Finding and entering the TARDIS for the first time in The Ghost Monument. Finally she's granted a close up of more than a couple of seconds that isn't about her pulling a face.
Quite often the direction of the scenes leads to plenty of reverse of shots of the companion's reacting to whatever the Doctor is doing which is seen in glimpses rather than staying on her work. On one hand this means that when the camera does stop and really looks at her she's captivating, but it also leads to becoming almost an afterthought within the blocking of some scenes when she should be the star attraction.
Unlike Star Trek, Doctor Who is not an ensemble show. For the most part. Although at times the companion has offered the audience's viewpoint into the adventure, the Doctor should always be the centre of attention and the stories should always be within his orbit, because otherwise what's the point? The least successful stories are always those in which a ton of action occurs across multiple scenes and then the Doctor arrives and fixes things. The Time Lord should be in the thick of it.
If I had a preference, it would be for the series to continue with Yaz as the main companion - Graham and Ryan feel like their story's been told. Their story arc is ultimately disconnected from the Doctor and often feels like Chibbers returning to a place of safety because he's otherwise overwhelmed by the business of writing Doctor Who. It should be the Doctor who steps up and offers the healing wisdom, be the fixed voice of calm not just tossing out insults.
The grand gesture in series eleven was that none of the episodes would feature a returning monster in order to give a new audience a jumping in point and they don't feel like they have to have a Doctor Who fan site on hand to understand any of it. For the most part, giving Thirteenth her own adversaries works well even if, again because of the sheer amount of regular cast members, these antagonists only really exist in relation to the TARDIS team's reaction to them.
Except its usually returning elements which help to define a new incarnation and one of the more exciting results of having a different actor in the role is in seeing how they embrace these kisses to the past. This also includes how a new production team absorbs them into the new way of doing this things and how they'll bring their own version of what has already been established. The Cybermen are in a constant state of flux.
Sometimes a companion is carried over. Third and Fourth both had very different relationships with Sarah Jane, just as Eleventh and Twelfth both approach Clara in a completely different manner. As well as reformatting the series, having UNIT in the Third Doctor's first story offered a glimpse into the dandy's opinion of the military in comparison to the clown. Chibbers apparently doesn't want us to see how Thirteenth, Kate and the Osgoods would react to one another.
But monsters are equally important. Again with the Cybermen, but notice how it allows Second in Tomb to enunciate just how different his approach to intervention is to his predecessor. When RTD reintroduced the Daleks in 2005, he did it half way through the series because it offered the chance for another wave of publicity and arguably the Ninth Doctor didn't really come into his own until he was staring down the lens of his mortal enemy.
Imagine if Resolution had been broadcast mid-series with a heavy publicity campaign telling us the Daleks were back but not quite as we remember them. People would tune in out of curiosity to see if the relaunch was better than the iDaleks and also to see how Jodie's Doctor dealt with their return. Much as happened back then, they would have seen her in a stand off against her foe in some of her strongest moments so far.
Like I said, all of this comes from a position of love and it has to be said I do love the Thirteenth Doctor. I just wish she was given more to do, narratively treated better. She should be the centre of attention but as I also said Chibbers seems more comfortable writing other things almost as though he's so afraid of cocking up this awesome responsibility. So he's presenting story arcs which could be an element of any series which just happen to be playing across the TARDIS's travels.
Making the show now seems like its become a real ordeal between having to deal with potentially international buyers, licensees and tons of scrutiny from all sides, fans to media. Plus, in cutting the duration of the series down by two more episodes, there's even less chance to catch lightening in a bottle or articulating what it is that you're trying to achieve. Let's see if lessons have been learnt when series twelve is broadcast. Whenever that might be.
TV Happy New Year! Right, let's get the UNIT dating controversy over with first, the controversy being that there isn't one. According the TARDIS Datacore, the version which exists in the 2040s on Earth-5556 is a shadow of its former self and Alice O'Donnell is a UNIT fan girl in Under The Lake which also suggests that UNIT is still in operation. Apart from that everything we know about the organisation across media happens before the 1st January 2019 so Chibbers has a pretty free hand in what he wants to do with it, which in this case is to have it on ice presumably as an explanation for why Kate Stewart and the two Osgoods don't appear in this story.
There are a few knotty implications to this. Who monitors the fifty odd thousand Zygons still living on Earth? Are there still two Osgoods? What about the Black Archive? How does Torchwood factor into this, or C19? It's shared universe syndrome, add a bit of continuity here watch a morass of mythology seep out at the other end. The Doctors haven't always phoned UNIT when they've been in the vicinity of some alien threat (especially when the Brig's in Geneva) so Chibbers must be making a point about something here - or setting up a story line for the next series whenever that's being broadcast or indeed a future Big Finish boxed set.
Next of all, how about no one recognising a Dalek despite multiple invasions over the past decade or so? The implication has been that either because of the cracks or rebooting the universe or some other Moffat fueled merriment (or the Faction Paradox) that Earth is once again a bit surprised about the existence of aliens, thereby sorting out the Van Stattan continuity error amongst other things. Time has been rewritten and so forth. It is interesting that throughout this series, humans have in general been less phased about the existence of alien life in general. Perhaps its a mutable thing, oscillating depending upon the needs of the story.
What are my resolutions? As I suggested yesternight, lose some more weight and be disciplined about it. Otherwise, try to catch up on my Who backlog, across audios and novels and blu-ray releases. I'm trying to have a daily dose of Doctor Who of which tonight's episode will probably be the only example broadcast on television. Soonish I'll hopefully have something near a complete run of TARGETs and I'm planning a blogging project around that, my other resolution being to stop neglecting this place so much, to post at least something every day. Yes, I know, I've said that before.
All of which skimming around the surface suggests I'm stalling in my opinion of Revolution, I'm really not. With a couple of reservations that was a barnstorming hour of Doctor Who with Jodie's Time Lord bursting with such energy her hair seemed to grow and shorten depending on whether she was in the TARDIS or not. Finally we got to hear her say the big mythology words like Dalek and Skaro and sound like she exists within a wider continuity or context. As has always been the case with each incarnation, you finally get a feel for the characterisation when the Doctors face their biggest foe and here's Thirteenth fighting against a desperate situation with brio and optimism.
Pitting her against a single Dalek is a good move because it allows for a more focused stand off as per Ninth in Dalek or Twelfth when he entered Into The Dalek. Unlike those occasions, this was not about the squid fighting their programming, this recon organism, wants nothing other than conquest and is unable to even comprehend benevolence. However impressive it is to see thousands of CGI pepperpots flying through space, sheer numbers can't make up for watching the calculated a single example lean in to its sadistic nature and embrace its internal superiority. Under Nick Briggs's vocal control, there are few things scarier than hearing one of these things laugh.
In a nice bookend to the start of the season, we also see the Dalek utilising local materials to fashion its casing. This hybrid between captured parts and refashioned materials is somehow even scarier than the revived Who's metallic design and also more in keeping with the antagonists orgins than the iDaleks from 2010 (yes, the new paradigm was nearly eight years ago folks and we're still getting over it). The fact that this sucker is home made will hopefully inspire kids to hash their own together using bits knowing that it doesn't have to look perfect to be canonical. Meanwhile, collectors of the Doctor Who Figurine Collection have another variation for the shelf.
The episode began well with the three sections of a thing being separated so as not for another terrible thing to happen. Arguably this is exactly the sort of mcguffin RTD was taking the piss out of in The Last of the Time Lords (something he enjoyed so much he repeated it a year later in Journey's End), making it part of this cross continental, multi-generational effort gave it enough heft that it provided the epic introduction a seasonal episode probably requires especially since it then focuses the rest of the episode back in Sheffield. You could imagine a prose version of this turning up as a prologue in a wilderness years novel.
Much less successful is the emotional B-plot between Ryan and his Dad. This isn't a criticism of the performers - Tosin's the strongest he's been all season here and Daniel Adegboyega (who previously played a guard on Torchwood's Miracle Day) gives Aaron a real sense of regret. It's just that the catastrophic Dad figure has become something of a trope in the Who revival era, with Rose, Martha and Clyde and innumerable supporting characters in between having had to deal with paternal toxicity. The comparison with Clyde from SJA is especially galling -- the character beats are incredibly similar right down to having the father being possessed by the alien of the week.
All of this also drew away from the A-story and I'd guess that most viewers would have preferred some more of the Doctor doing stuff than one of these too long scenes between Ryan, Aaron and Graham however well performed. The idea's presumably to tie-in with the episode title, but this stuff simply didn't feel connected enough to the main plot and in my acronym for having humble opinion, Doctor Who's at its strongest with the various plot elements are motivated by the overall story. The US production model tends be a bit more relaxed in this regard because of the amount of durational real estate which has to be filled. Doctor Who (ironically) has less time for it.
The love story between the two archaeologists felt stronger because of this, so compelling in fact that I didn't notice the episode didn't have a title sequence until ten minutes in. Having such a long opening introductory scene is a very classic Who approach and a very welcome change from the latter end of the Moffat era when secondary characters tended to be an after thought. It's a real credit to Chibbers that he manages to keep their story relevant throughout the hour even after the number of companion like characters who need servicing has doubled. I'll admit that part of me wishes they'd left in the TARDIS instead.
This was by far the strongest Sheffield set episode of the series and just behind It Takes You Away in terms of quality. As with most episodes, it'll be worth rewatching just for the dialogue some of which is positively iconic and if not that education. Clock Jodie's glee in explaining how the microwave parts roast the Dalek and making the scientific jargon sound convincing. With some of the pressure off being the flagship broadcast on Christmas Day, it seemed happier to simply be the proper season finale which The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos could never be and clearly wasn't supposed to.
