Watched: December 2024

“Just try not to get engaged, or accidentally invent tarmac.”

Just so much *fun*. Love the Bridgerton rip off (the very relaxed, multi-racial version of the Regency, with a contemporary pop played by a string quartet). Love the bit where the Doctor and Ruby simultaneously explain the plot to each other. Adore the sense of two people who really fancy each other introducing each other to their worlds.

One lovely thing here is that you think you’re watching Doctor Who trying to do Bridgerton because that’s just what it does, and then it turns out it’s actually the aliens in the story trying to do Bridgerton: it isn’t just riffing on it, it’s the actual plot (“It’s cosplay! All of this”!)

Emily’s delight in learning modern language is adorable (”I know the word okay!”). Indira Varma, meanwhile, is having the time of her life – the scene in which, uncommented, she just takes glass after glass of champagne from a nearby waiter and downs them is delightful. Her comment that “We can start wars with the French and the Spanish and the Portuguese and everyone who doesn’t look British” is a bit weird – it’s 1813; there’s plenty of war already going on, and the fact no one seems aware of that reminds me of Woman Who Lived’s failure to notice the massive civil war. But I suppose it’s another aspect of the Bridgerton parody.

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Okay, enough about that, let’s talk about the other thing. It’s a very RTD1 structure – as with Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror there’s a definite vibe that this has been written by someone who grew up on the 2005 iteration of the show – but with the single twist that the Doctor’s love interest is his own sex. In a fairly radical season, it’s a weirdly trad episode, by which I mean, the same sort of thing the show might have done nearly 20 years earlier. The only radicalism here is being utterly unflinching in putting a gay love story for the Doctor front and centre, and portraying it as the most romantic thing the show’s ever done.

Like Rose or The Girl in the Fire Place, Rogue’s name being the title feels significant (”Just the Doctor?” “Just Rogue?”). Before broadcast, I’d assumed it was a sort of comment on a character type rather than an actual name, that it was essentially an episode called “Cad”. The man himself is very clearly an inversion of Captain Jack – a sexy guy in a long blue coat who’s undercover and has a cloaked spaceship (a bounty hunter is basically a time agent, after all). But he’s serious to the Doctor’s more relaxed persona: both Rogue and Jack are clearly there to mirror the Doctor they’re up against (Spock/not Spock, to quote Rose in The Empty Child.)

And Jonathan Groff is amazing in it, really selling the idea that somewhere behind all that brooding this guy is actually sad and vulnerable, and for a mostly straight sort of chap I found his performance confusingly hot. The bit where it turns out this serious, smouldering man listens to Kylie is hilarious, and, delightfully, means that Kylie exists in the Whoniverse despite having been in the show. Also, he has a huge teddy bear!

The twist at the end where Rogue acts like he’s going to press the button, getting rid of the aliens even though it’ll mean losing Ruby too, then sacrifices himself instead is structurally inevitable and bordering on cliche. But it’s so well done that I don’t even care that I’m being manipulated.

73 yards is probably the most interesting episode this season. But this is the one I would say I most love.

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Other things:

• This week, Susan Twist is a portrait. Everyone else in Regency garb.

• “This is no way to die” – okay Doctor what’s a good way then?

• Hugely enjoyed Chekhov’s psychic earrings. “Instant Strictly!”

• “This job has so much paperwork ever since we got that new boss” – is this meant to be the evil boss who comes up a lot? If so, why is Rogue working for them? (I assume we haven’t met them yet, it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense that Rogue and the Meep would be working for Sutekh.)

• I’ve got a note here that says “The birds speak French and everyone screams”, does that actually happen or have I gone weird? Anyway, the bird costumes are delightfully absurd.

• The Doctor cries, again, FFS? Seems reasonable this time though I guess.

• I LOVE that the parade of Doctor faces has Richard E. Grant off Scream of the Shalka in it, they’re really not messing about any more when it comes to canon. Or possibly they really are messing around. I also thought I saw Cushing but can find no other reference on the internet so surely not.

• “Do you ever wonder… why keep going? “Because we have to. We have to live each day because they can’t.” That… really got me.

• “Why isn’t it cloaked?” “It’s behind a tree” may be the funniest line of the season.

• Is it possible I’m overrating this episode because I really fancy Rogue?

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Watched: December 2024

“We’re shielded off! How did they get inside?”

So, I have a complicated relationship with this one, and I’m gonna be up front about the fact it doesn’t make me look great.

Tonally, it reminds me of Gridlock – the police uncontactable, the monsters invading, the sense of world breaking down with everyone trapped in their own little worlds. There’s also a mention of Plaza 55, which is surely a deliberate nod to Orphan 55, another story of a cosy world in a bubble invaded by monsters of man’s own creation. It’s this season’s example of the sort of Futureshock-y genre, the stories satirising contemporary issues that the show has always toyed with but which become a basically annual feature from about 1987 onwards.

Finetime (great name) is also “the number one centre for substack processing” which makes me feel personally attacked. And let’s be honest, at this point in history, the idea that social media has attained sentence and decided to start killing its users is quite resonant.

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Anyway, that’s what I assumed that was what I was watching – a story about how social media was ruining us (“I don’t know how to walk without the arrows”; “It blocked me, I’m trapped outside the city”; etc). And I hated Lindy, a response I didn’t realise deliberate for quite a long time (I had been in a pub). The grammar of the building romance between Lindy and Ricky (”You’re SO good at walking”, “I thought this was the worst day of my life but maybe it’s the best”, the hand holding, the music) is so brilliantly done it makes her betrayal genuinely shocking.

So: I didn’t enjoy it, and I wasn’t watching especially closely, and yes this is obviously immense quantities of white privilege speaking, but I didn’t get what it was really doing at all. I didn’t spot that the entire guest cast was white, or realise that Lindy was being racist as well as rude in the way she spoke to the Doctor. I didn’t even get it at the end: I thought they were idiots, not racists. It just didn’t occur to me that anyone would be racist against Doctor Who.

My only defence here is that, on a second watch – once I knew it was trying to make me, specifically, aware of being a privileged little shit, rather than just being another of RTD’s occasional “aww, ordinary awful people, aren’t they BRILLIANT” stories – I liked it a lot more.

This is, incidentally, the second Doctor-lite story in a row, and was purportedly one of the first scenes that Ncuti filmed. How do we feel about him having to do scene in which he begs to be allowed to save racists’ lives before almost anything else, then?

I have another better and more reliable newsletter that isn’t about Doctor Who, and it’s currently 25% off! Ahh go on, it’s Christmas.

Other things:

• The Radio Free Skaro podcast called its episode on this “White Mirror”; the next one, on Rogue, was “Fowl & Fallibility”. Those guys are really killing it at the name game.

• For the second time this season it’s someone’s first hug. Wonder what’s going on with that.

• “Urine content is zero for the third day in a row” what

• Ricky September is 25? Is he bullshit (I looked it up, the actor’s 32, it’s quite Luke Perry). Mind you, they’re all too old for the numbers we see on screen.

• The homeworld population being zero genuinely upsetting. Ricky genuinely heroic. the look he gives Lindy when she betrays him – not angre or fear, just so, so disappointed – is amazing

• and then he’s basically shot in the head. Gah.

• Lindy delivers “They’re coming for me” in exactly the same way as Lesley Sharp in Midnight.

• This week the Doctor cries, again. Great coat, though. Susan Twist is Lindy’s mum, Penny Pepper-Bean

• The bit with all the muted people screaming when Gothic Paul gets eaten is amazing. Ditto, in a quite different way, the looks of genuine disgust when they see the Doctor.

• Weird how this was so expensive when the monsters and settings are both rubbish – the apparent paradise looks, by virtue of being filmed largely in a university campus on a grey day, incredibly miserable, and not especially fine at all – all the money went on Lindy’s bubble and those extras.

• The door that will only open if you put in a two digit number every five seconds for minutes on end is a particularly stupid bit of sci fi design, 42 eat your heart out.

• The guy playing Cavendish is brilliantly slimy. “We don’t have titles yet, but if the role of leader was up for grabs…”

• Racist walks into a lamppost, lol.

Watched: December 2024

“Rule number one: do not step on the grass.”

My attempts to rewatch the season have stalled here twice, even though it might be the best one. It might be that, even though I’m a sucker for stories that go to places the show hasn’t before, horror isn’t really my thing. Or it might just be that it is, in the most literal sense, nightmarish.

For one thing, it’s set in an incredibly hostile world – the unfriendly pub, the borderline aggressive barmaid, the way they all conspire to wind her up about the fairy circle (“For god’s sake, child, you walked into a piece of string”; Sian Phillips is amazing in it, by the way, is there anyone from I, Claudius they still need to cast? Biggins has only done Big Finish, I suppose).

But that’s fairly regular TV horror fare. Where it goes next is haunting in a way Who rarely is. Is there any line in the history of this show more painful than “Even your real mother didn’t want you”? The look Carla gives Ruby from the back of the cab might be the most terrifying moment in all of Doctor Who, although Kate abandoning a companion is almost as great a violation. The people who complain that we never find out what the strange woman says are missing the point – any answer would be disappointing, the point is that is the very concept that there could be something she could say which would make your mother abandon you. Like I said: a nightmare.

Just to really ramp up the unnerving vibes it’s also a deeply odd episode structurally, from the lack of opening credits onwards. The way the time shown accelerates, so days pass, then weeks, months, years – then suddenly we've watched an entire life, communicated mainly through birthday cards and wigs. Plus, of course, there’s something truly creepy about the whole concept of someone whose face you can never see – which makes the moment she finally approaches at the end even scarier.

I’m less sold on the political stuff – it still feels like RTD hasn’t bothered to Google “parliamentary democracy” at any point. Anyway, Albion is the party from Years and Years. I can’t decide if I think it’s overkill to make Gwilliam sex pest as well as psycho. The cut on “I’ll even carry the coats” to Ruby carrying the coats looking pissed off is hilarious.

I’m not sure the paradox makes logical sense – the random Roger ap Gwilliam reference at start feels a bit weird – is this whole story meant to be about preventing Roger ap Gwilliam? Which Ruby does, but then becomes the woman who inspires her to do it, but then in doing so prevents it ever happening? Huh?

…but as with the unheard words I don’t think it really matters. This story is incredible, if not always fun. All the more so when you consider that the Doctor vanishes 90 seconds in and a 19 year old actress carries most of this herself.

+++A COMMERCIAL MESSAGE: HERE ARE 47 FACTS TO SHOW HOW MY BOOK A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 47 BORDERS MAKES THE IDEAL CHRISTMAS PRESENT. MESSAGE ENDS+++

Other things:

• It’s faintly baffling that everyone in this seems to use imperial measurements, not metric. I assume because they sound older and thus spookier.

• UNIT now investigates “the extra terrestrial... and more and more the supernatural”, apparently. Which is a mission statement of sorts. When Kate says how the world survives without the Doctor is “classified”, I wonder if she’s referring to the upcoming spin off – the Doctor does mention “The war between the land and the sea”.

• This week Susan Twist is a hiker! Ncuti, meanwhile, dresses like a fisherman for the eight or nine seconds he’s on screen.

• “I could make it snow, once upon a time.” “That’s nice.” The scenes on the cliff tops make it look like it might have actually snowed on location? Which actually is nice.

• “I can’t get a signal for the engine this far out” blimey, the future sounds shit. Talking of which:

• “2031, the Great Russian War” – oh, god.

• The moss coloured TARDIS in the final minutes of the episode is incredibly eerie. At the very end there is now a note in the circle reading “Love you, Josh”. Wonder what happened to Josh.

• Okay, I know it’s been a running joke for a while that Amol Rajan gets every job like some kind of BBC George Osborne, but… now he’s on Doctor Who, somehow? FFS.

Watched: November 2024

“I’m a much bigger bang than you bargained for.”

Actually, this being Moffat’s first Who script in over six years, there are loads of great lines.

“Death by salesman.”

“Give it time. Everywhere’s a beach eventually”

“I am a higher-dimensional lifeform, I am a complex space time event.” “I’m Anglican.”

“Vacuum drones, hoovering up the smoke so that nobody can choke to death before they are safely shot.” The way Ncuti spits that out is amazing, even if the Doctor is now getting a letter from the trademark protection guy at hoover.

Anyway: this one’s a bit of a Moffat megamix. It combines the “healthcare systems are scary!” theme we’ve had from Empty Child to Girl Who Waited to World Enough and Time with an ending when the machines protect the kid, like a cross between the endings of Closing Time and Death in Heaven. The AI holograms are the latest in a long line of creepy memorials including flesh aspects and weepy angels. The anti-capitalist fury is like that in Oxygen.

And this story, as suggested by the last line I quoted above, is so angry, in a way that feels striking from both Moffat and Who. You might have got stories about a company that creates a war to give itself a market, and employs an algorithm to work out whether it’d be more profitable to kill the sick than heal them, a decade earlier. But both the Doctor’s furious attacks on the nature of faith and the repeated refrain of “Thoughts and prayers” feels a lot more political than, to pick a random example, “oooh wifi’s new and scary isn’t it?”

I was going to put the ambulance murdering Canto immediately after declaring his love into this box, but that sort of happened with Danny ten years before. At least that time it was an accident, though. This time, capitalists do it on purpose.

It’s so obviously the cheap one - the two settings, the cast of six, the way it looks a bit crap in places - that I wonder if the whole “the Doctor can’t move!” thing was actually retrofitted to justify it. But it does give Ncuti a chance to shine. I love the contrast between the energy with which he runs into the story and everything that follows.

I’ve also written down, “How many stories does the Doctor cry in?” which is actually a bit mad because it’s “most of the rest of the season”.

Actually, this is kind of my criticism, really: the whole thing gets a bit histrionic. The music suggests the moment where Canto shoots Ruby as she’s about to shoot Munday in the foot to distract the ambulance is meant to read as tragic… but it’s also blackly funny, and the director hasn’t noticed. At the end, the reuse of the music from Ruby Road suggests we’ve reached the end of a movie-length journey, but we haven’t had a movie worth of material. (There’s a whole five minutes left when the Doctor finally gets off the landmine. It weirdly doesn’t feel like he’s on it that long.)

And the joyous tone of the ending fits poorly with the fact the kid’s dad is still actually dead. She ends up smiling, because the shape of the story demands it and [checks notes] not literally everyone she’s ever met is dead now. But she’s an orphan. It doesn’t work.

Actually, the kid’s my biggest problem, really. The child actor is too old for the role she’s playing: surely a girl that old wouldn’t still believe a lot of nonsense about what happened to her mother, and would recognise that a hologram isn’t her dad. She should understand death. And why is she wandering around a battlefield anyway? Or maybe this is just my own personal situation affecting my judgement of stuff involving children again? I dunno.

It’s good. The political stuff is great. But remixes are never quite as good as the original, are they? I’m not sure whether Ncuti’s “right, that’s enough of that” is an attempt to undercut the melodrama or an acknowledgement that the tone is off.

***A BRIEF COMMERCIAL MESSAGE***

My book A History of the World in 47 Borders makes an excellent Christmas present. (Bill Bryson says it’s good! The actual Bill Bryson!)

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***AND NOW, BACK TO THE SHOW***

Other things:

• Having spent Disney’s money on creating the world’s longest corridor, Doctor Who now uses it to build its own quarry.

• The title is close enough to Boom Town to be annoying. It’s Rose/Rosa all over again.

• Talking of names, “Splice” isn’t one, though it is quite a good joke

• This week Susan twist is an ambulance. Ncuti wears some clothes that did not especially stick in the memory.

• That’s 14 years now we’ve been running into the space vicars - Moff is building his own mini 51st century continuity in a manner that suggests an awareness of Lance Parkin’s Ahistory. I love the use of ranks and lines like “I don’t have the divinity!” Also the fact they’re Anglican, pretty much the least militant religion available.

• Other references: Villangard first got a mention in The Empty Child, “fishfingers and custard” comes from The Eleventh Hour, the whole thing is basically that scene in Genesis of the Daleks part 1.

• If Ruby’s been travelling with the Doctor for six months, then why is this her first planet? Again feels like the episode order got swapped.

• “He probably needs changing.” The second joke this season about that. Also: again, we are reminded that the Doctor has kids.

• A failsafe system that involves blowing up regardless is not a very good failsafe system. (This might also be a joke.)

• Okay, something else that really annoys me: why do they bother with the singing the Skye Boat Song so they know the exact beat for Ruby to hand the Doctor the weird smelted body thing, only to slow down at the end of the line? It’s nonsense. FFS. Again, I blame the director.

• “Varada Sethu is SO hot” I’ve written here. So there you go. I wonder if she’s back next year as this character or a different one.

• “He’s not gone. He’s just dead.” Yeah, about that.

Watched: November 2024

“Sound and vision!”

I sort of love that there’s an episode of Doctor Who in which you know the world’s gone wrong because John Lennon says, “I’m no good at anything”. Anyway: this is not normally the bit of TV I appreciate, but by far the most interesting thing about this episode is the direction. It’s weirdly avant-garde.

It’s beautifully put together, with loads of very deliberately composited shots and striking visuals. The Abbey Road crossing. The Maestro appearing in a piano or reflections. The Doctor and Ruby being imprisoned in a drum and a double bass; the musical notation being used to tie the doors shut. There’s the gorgeous sequence – a Get Back reference? – with Ruby playing piano on the roof, while the Doctor watches the (strikingly multicultural. for the London of 1963) skyline. There’s the properly wonderful sequence with no sound whatsoever, in which neither how the Doctor does it nor how Maestro undoes it is clear but it doesn’t really seem to matter. Plus, there are lots of beauty-of-the-mundane shots of corridors that remind me of Wes Anderson – probably because, as noted, I don’t generally notice direction and thus lack the language to describe it.

There are also loads of bits that break the fourth wall. Mastro looking at the camera or playing the opening notes of the theme tune, the closing bars of which play tinnily from the TARDIS jukebox. The final, terrible musical number. (It fits with the story, but come on, it’s dreadful. Also there isn’t always a twist at the end of every story, so we should probably assume it’s a “SUSAN TWIST IS SIGNIFICANT” joke.) The theme of the story, combined with the dance sequence and the fact it’s now summer for Ruby – she also says stuff like “You never hide!” having known the Doctor for three minutes – make me wonder if this was originally supposed to be episode 6, but was brought forward to go out alongside Eurovision.

I quite like that it isn’t that music has been stolen, it’s just that people hate it now. The joke of the bad Beatles song is very funny, at least partly because it feels like a worse but plausible addition to the bit of their canon that gave us Maxwell’s Silver Hammer or Octopuses’ Garden. Regarding the actual Beatles, the voices are perfect – you can tell which is which – but they all look slightly wrong, except McCartney, who looks entirely wrong. (Also, did Lennon wear glasses this early? Are they trying to make him more identifiable?) George Martin, at least, is very well cast.

The “music battle” is delightfully camp, more dance than fight: they just sort of move round each other while bashing a piano. It’s also incredibly unclear what killing someone with music, or removing it from the world, actually means – it doesn’t map onto anything, it’s purely symbolic. Very little of the episode seems to make literal sense. But if you can appreciate Jinkx Monsoon’s performance, which is obviously brilliant (I have friends I shan’t damn by naming, who think otherwise), then this is delightful – so good I forget how good it is unless I’m watching it because all I can think of is that bloody musical number. I like that Doctor Who has actually got weirder under Disney, though: that feels like a statement of intent.

Is the chord at the end the one from A Day in the Life? I love that even though there’s no actual Beatles song, music is saved by Lennon and McCartney playing together.

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Other things:

• The London geography visible from the roof of Abbey Road is very obviously wrong and equally obviously I found that annoying.

• The pre-credits, like that of The Giggle, is set in 1925. I wonder why? Anyway the incidental music in this scene is oddly 80s.

• Ncuti outfit watch: a red polo shirt, then blue suit and afro. I've also written “flashback to hat”, no idea why? Oh, and Susan Twist this week is the tea lady.

• Regarding the Pantheon: so, Doctor Who has gods now? That feels inspired by “great old ones” from Virgin books. Which in turn was a lift from Lovecraft, or course.

• “Genocide rolled across time and space”... This week we get another attempt to show history can and does change now, presumably to raise the stakes. It's very Pyramids of Mars oh shit that's a clue isn't it? Anyway: this week it doesn't just snow, it rains ash on the London of 2024.

• The song hidden deep inside Ruby’s soul is the Carol of the Bells, the soundtrack from the Christmas special. Cool.

• I hadn't heard of the Mrs Mills Piano and on goggling a) yes, she was real, and b) I'm fairly sure it’s a joke.

• The Doctor on genius: “Oh I would never call myself that”. Sure, Jan.

• The random Totters Lane/Susan references are obviously intended to mislead. “You have children?” “I did have, I will have” – which suggests strongly that Susan's coming back, even if not this season.

• “The one who waits is almost here”. Evil Susan, you heard it here first.

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Your occasional reminder that it’s currently 25% off subscriptions to my other, more reliable, less Who-ish newsletter….

Actually, I do have some ulterior motives. Firstly, my book A History of the World in 47 Borders makes an excellent Christmas present for any humans you happen to have in your life. Foyles shortlisted it for “book of the year”! I lost to Sally Rooney, but it still counts.

Secondly, I’m on the panel for the Oh God, What Now? Christmas liveshow at the Comedy Store, Leicester Square next Tuesday. Come along!

Right, that’s enough promo, here’s some nonsense about Doctor Who:

15.2: Space Babies

Broadcast: May 2024

Watched: November 2024

“I am so, so glad to be alive.”

Or, more prosaically: “A baby farm, run by babies!”

A bit of a remix. New Earth x The End of the World (Ruby looking out of the window is a direct lift), with just a touch of some of the more Red Dwarf-y bits of Sleep No More and the DNA scan nicked from a couple of different Moffat episodes. (Why does the Doctor just leave it running on the wall? Idiot.)

Like New Earth it suffers slightly from the show having already done the proper episode 1 at Christmas. And despite the fact this is, on some levels, this era’s fourth attempt at a launch (Star Beast, the last 20 minutes of The Giggle, Ruby Road, this), it still spends the first few minutes doing a lot of “explaining how Doctor Who works” stuff.

I’m also not entirely convinced by the decision to pair the new regulars with an almost entirely baby-based guest cast. I don’t go soppy over babies anyway – I do not, and may have missed my chance to, have one – so it isn’t aimed at me. But if it’s aimed at kids that feels a bit of a misfire – kids famously don’t like watching stuff about younger kids do they? – and the sentimentality jars with me slightly. Plus (this may just be me) lead baby Eric is a bit too Arnold J. Rimmer-y for me to find remotely cute. Also when he cries, surely the noise we hear is a younger baby? (Come to that, is it properly articulated why they remain babies for years?)

A lot of the humour is also a bit, well, young: the bogeyman, the fart jokes, the way they find Eric because they smell his nappy. (Is this the only story in which someone explicitly soils themselves?) The nanny filter is pretty funny, although the fact the Doctor nearly says “shit” feels extremely weird. The bogeyman is first mentioned immediately after the nose blow sequence, which is a bit obvious in retrospect. I really don’t think the episode sells the pivot from “the bogeyman is a monster!” to “we must save the bogeyman!”

On the other hand, though… This is also a story in which the Doctor, played by a Rwandan, upgrades “There was a war” to “There was a genocide”; in which the allegory is about the absurdity of anti-abortion campaigners forcing kids to be born but then completely losing interest in their well-being, and which is fundamentally about refugees. Even in this fluffiest of episodes, it’s already clear this season is going to go hard.

So there are loads of good bits – I think maybe it’s just not for me. Which is fine. Other things:

• This week, Ncuti’s outfit is a zip up woollen top, while Susan Twist is a comms officer.

• Ncuti’s delivery of his speech about having freedom is pretty amazing. “How do you keep going?” “For days like this.” I wonder if this is RTD writing about his husband again.

• The moment with the snow feels quite weird, but intriguing. The repeated refrains of “Push the button” and “Space babies!” are actually quite irritating.

• I’ve written down “very Davison”. Not sure why. Terminus?

• I like the bit where Ruby reads “Pacifico Del Rio” and says “Oh, that’s in English!”

• The TARDIS now lands instantly; the Doctor threatens to move the babies in it (hmm, maybe that’s the very Davison bit?).

• Sort of love the “stepping on a butterfly” sequence, as a way of showing that history can and does change. Also the dinosaurs are a real “Look, we have budget now!” sequence.

• “No one else like me exists,and that is true of everyone” – doesn’t that mean the Doctor has to stop everyone dying? I mean, I guess it is the mission, but…

• Talking of which: Star Trek is fiction and you can visit it. There’s a mission statement for Doctor Who if ever there was one.

Watched: April 2024

Preamble first.

So I was at a party (yes, I go to those) the other night, when a reader (yes, I have those; hi, Harry) recommended this blog to his boyfriend, who he is trying to get into Doctor Who. That was when I realised I was an episode behind and the new series was about to start, and I should really get on this. So, a mere four months later, here’s my bit on the Christmas special.

Before that, though, another reason for spamming you fine people – my new book A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines On Our Maps is available now from all good bookshops and also some bad ones. It is not in any way about Doctor Who (though inevitably the odd reference sneaks in), but instead is a collection of essays about weird, funny or interesting borders throughout history, from the unification of Egypt in 3100BCE to the space race today, via Rome, China, the Holy Roman Empire, the Schleswig-Holstein Question and some accidental invasions of Liechtenstein. I’m really very proud of it, and if you’ve been enjoying these blogs I hope you’ll consider buying it. 

Right, that’s enough of that, let’s get what you came for.

Oooh so many lines which sum this one up:

“Rule number one. Don’t lose the baby!”

“I wonder who I’d be without you.”

“He’s not a myth, he’s an actual thing.”

“Who’s Ruby?”

Labyrinth meets It’s A Wonderful Life, with just a hint of FInal Destination. In the best tradition of Doctor Who, this takes a bunch of stuff we recognise, and remixes it to produce something new.

And it really is a totally different to anything we’ve seen before. The sailing ship in the sky, the vaguely fairly tale vibe, the importance of coincidence (does that mean anything? Does it matter if it doesn’t?)... it gives us a story that’s closer to fantasy and farther from sci-fi than we’re used to, and it all adds to the Christmassy vibe. So does the random, unexplained musical number, which also gave us an annoyingly catchy Christmas single. (It went nowhere.) It all feels less literal. 

Four episodes in, it'd pretty clear that RTD isn’t back just to play the hits. 

This is also the smallest of his Christmas specials. The Earth isn’t in danger; the Doctor is simply trying to save Ruby and Lulubelle (“What a terrible name!”). But just as Rose is less the story of the invasion than of the new companion discovering the Doctor’s world, this is the same story for Ruby. There’s a slight structural weirdness that she’s playing the Rose role, yet there are times – the scene with the policeman; the bit after the timelines change – when the Doctor is the protagonist. For this week at least they’re basically joint leads.

The new cast and their characters alike are great, obviously. Ruby and her family are immediately likeable (love the grandmother’s continual demands for tea and flirting with the Doctor). Ruby herself is, I think, the first RTD companion who’s not running anything from something – instead she’s looking for answers about herself and her origins. The mysteries of the season to come are nicely set up, which is annoying when it’s another four months before the next episode. (Who the hell is Mrs Flood meant to be and why does she get to break the fourth wall live Lovejoy?)

It’s very RTD to find the actual character note buried in the entirely undercooked Timeless Children plot (“I’m adopted”). I also wonder whether the Doctor showing up to see a companion as a baby is an attempt to do his own better/less creepy version of Moffat’s Amy and Clara plots – RTD2 is very clearly in dialogue with the stuff made since RTD1. (See also, “Then why are you crying?” which is pretty much a direct lift from VIncent & the Doctor. Michelle Greenidge is amazing in that scene.)

As to the Doctor himself, his main characteristic is his physicality I think – the dancing scene, the running along rooftops bounding chimney pots. (There are definitely two of him in that nightclub, right?) This is another entry in our list of stories where the villains are defeated by the Doctor climbing a thing (see also Idiot’s Lantern, Vampire of Venice, Rebel Flesh etc).

The ending itself feels oddly… small. There’s some dramatic music and the Doctor pulls the ship out of the sky, and it’s over and everything is fine. It feels a bit easy, and defeating metaphorical monsters through physical action feels a mismatch.

But this is nitpicking. It’s great, and fresh, and in an entirely different way to the trilogy it followed by all of a fortnight. We are so back.

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Other things:

• The episode, like Lulubelle, has a terrible name, sorry.

• If the Goblin King had swallowed the baby, what was everyone else at the feast supposed to eat? How was a single baby ever going to last three days? Most importantly of all: are musical numbers just a thing Doctor Who is going to do now?

• Where on Earth are they going with the “mavity” thing? Given that Susan Twist, the actress who shouts at the band, was Isaac Newton’s housekeeper two episodes back, I feel like they must be going somewhere.

• The realisation that “once upon a time” in the opening monologue means Christmas 2004, a mere three months before they broadcast Rose, pretty much broke me. 

• It’s funny how Notting Hill looks like Bristol, isn’t it? Also, how the hell is anyone moving to Notting Hill in this day and age? I fear the modern housing market is another of those boring real world things which RTD doesn’t find very interesting, and fair enough I guess. (Has he got the idea of rent control from American TV?)

• Talking of the great man, I met him at the premiere of this episode and turned from my normally suave and charming self into a gibbering teenage boy. There are photos, which will never see the light of day, in which I look upsettingly like Shrek.

• Laughed quite hard at, “Merry Christmas, Davina McCall”.

• My notes include the phrase “Colour palette? Bleached”. No idea.

• Ncuti is the first Doctor with facial hair except Smith, briefly, and Hurt. 

• So… did the Doctor f*ck Houdini or what? And who the hell is Mrs Flood?

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Anyway, I’m gonna try and write up the new episodes in the week after they come out. You lucky, lucky people! 

In the mean time check out the Who Watch Podcast, in which upsettingly young people David and Beth watch the show in order from the beginning and occasionally stop to be mean about me, and please, please, please, I can’t stress this enough, buy my book.

“Your good or your bad are nothing to me. All that exists is to win or to lose.”

For most of its run time, this is a properly brilliant movie-sized Doctor Who story, coming close to surpassing everything RTD has ever done before and more. And then there are the last 20 minutes, about which I keep changing my mind.

The big things in no particular order: I bloody love the theme of mass media, of screens, driving us gradually mad, making everyone think that they’re right. (The guy at the start who says “I’ve always been right!” is one of those brilliant one-shot performances; very unclear if he dies or not.) The government minister who is basically Boris Johnson feels like the sort of thing we might have got from RTD1; Trinity Wells as a Fox-style TV host who’s basically gone anti-vax does not. All this feels like a much stronger and angrier political statement than we’d have got from the sunnier RTD of the 2000s.

As to the Toymaker... A non-fan who hadn’t watched asked me if Neil Patrick Harris was any good, then complained that it was a waste to cast him and not give him a musical number. This was a delight because I got to tell her he had a whole dance routine in which he lip synced to Spice Up Your Life, thus proving that Doctor Who>literally anything else. 

NPH gives quite a different performance to the one Michael Gough did in 1966, far more lively and fun. I like the way the story gives him a series of absurd accents: bits like “You must be used to sunnier climes”, too, lean into the idea that the original wasn’t a racist portrayal, but a portrayal of a racist. (Jim Cooray-Smith has written about how the original TV story wasn’t racist, it’s just been misunderstood, largely by Americans; there was a good Twitter thread recently in which a young fan named Jamie highlights the fact these misunderstandings date back to at least 1985.)

The entire sequence in the Toymaker’s realm is brilliantly nightmarish: the maze of doors, the murderous dolls, people becoming puppets. The bit in UNIT HQ where the Toymaker turns soldiers into balls with screaming faces is genuinely quite horrifying. 

That UNIT HQ, by the way, looks *so* big budget! The idea you’d put a secret military outfit in a huge skyscraper in central London with a big gun on top remains hilarious. (Regarding it being on the site of Lloyds of London: is this a gag? UNIT also provides insurance?) I love that the Vlinx is just there, UNIT just has an alien robot computer thing now and we all need to deal with that. I hope that a) it’s not evil and b) it’s never explained.

I also love that they bring Melanie back but don’t really do anything with her: it’s just “Well we need a character, might as well give Bonnie some work, she’s great and got a raw deal in the ‘80s”. It’s a sort of nothing-y part as written,but will have greater resonance for fans than if she’d been some random character actor. I wonder if Chibnall’s mechanism for shifting ex-companions to the role of supporting cast will be one of his biggest legacies.

Ooh, UNIT is now nearly all-female! Seriously, though, where’s Osgood?

Okay. That’s enough blocking. Let’s talk about the ending. 

“It feels different this time...” 

The regeneration happens with 18 minutes left in the episode, which is kind of nuts. Like large chunks of the internet I was instinctively a bit uncomfortable with the idea of bigeneration: the fact the first black lead is immediately sharing the limelight with his most successful predecessor. Also if old Doctors can just survive it feels like it might kind of break the show? The fact regeneration is the death of the lead, but also not, feels kind of important. 

It also just feels weird that there are suddenly two Doctors there. It doesn’t obviously mesh with the other themes, of mass media driven madness or playing games. And it is fundamentally undramatic to beat a god by playing catch.

On the other hand, though… that game is foreshadowed in the toyshop. On that occasion, the game stops when Donna says “Enough!” and catches the last ball. She later says “Well, maybe I’ll save you”. Which she does. All that is rather lovely.

And once the thought it hit me - this may be my own baggage, sorry - that all this stuff is actually about Russell giving up work to care for his husband (“I’ve never been so happy in my life” contrasting with “I don’t want to go”), it… kind of broke me. I watched the end credits with actual tears.

“He’s not dying alone. You can do what you like to me, I’m gonna be with him.” Oh, Donna. 

As to the problems with bigeneration... I suspect they’ll all go away soon enough because Ncuti immediately owns the screen, and once we’ve seen him as the lead for a couple of episodes, the fact there’s a David Tennant Doctor eating tuna madras in Chiswick won’t matter in the slightest. It’s also clearly a mechanism for dumping all the Doctor’s angst in a corner and starting again a bit. (“I’m fine because you fixed yourself. We’re doing rehab out of order” - is the implication that the retired 14 is still, somehow, before 15?) That suggests I was wrong about how RTD planned to use Fluxi

Oh yeah, also they’ve parked Tennant and Tate in case they want to make a movie, right? You want your most successful cast, and doing it in the main continuity poses both licence fee and scheduling problems. Christmas 2026, you mark my words.

~~~~~~A BRIEF COMMERCIAL MESSAGE~~~~~~

Looking for the ideal last minute Christmas present? I have written several books. Or you can take our a gift subscription to my other newsletter. We now return you to your regular programming.

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Other things:

• “Soho, 1925” looks great, but not in any way like Soho.

• Instead of a perspex barrier, this week it’s a door. But there really is a lot of stuff about barriers between people this season.

• “Maybe long-term travel in the TARDIS puts you out of sync” - hang on, Wilf barely travelled in the TARDIS? OH MY GOD MISSING STORIES WITH THE 10TH DOCTOR AND WILF? Don't tell Big Finish, they’ll recast him. (Actually I’m a bit uncomfortable with Cribbins here being played by a hat, a wheelchair and some re-used dialogue, but needs must.)

• “An elemental force with the power of a god…” Talking of spin-offs, are the Toymaker’s numerous appearances in other media just not canon now? (Mel’s fate in the New Adventures is still fine: the 7th Doctor is such a dick in Head Games that she probably just went back to Glitz.)

• Kate is so different when she's being horrible, it made me realise that her general flatness is actually a performance choice. It’s interesting how she quietly became a proper long-running character: that’s 11 years she's been in it now. Also, the wheelchair bit referenced the discourse that happened following The Star Beast, even though it must have been filmed ages ago: RTD guessed what would happen! It was deliberate!

• The fact the Doctor doesn’t seem to realise that games don’t have a memory is, incidentally, a bit weird.

• The “Well that's alright then!” bit is *brilliant*. It’s funny that they work through the Doctor's guilt over the fate of his Moffat era companions, and then just... don't even mention Yaz? Damning critique of Chibnall’s lack of character work there. 

• The fact the new Doctor takes the new TARDIS not the old feels weird. Is that a misfire?

• Lot of references this mini-season - already had Midnight and (obviously) The Star Beast - but here they go into overdrive: this one feels like a mash-up of The Celestial Toymaker and Last of the Time Lords, with references to Mavic Chen, Logopolis, and Adric. Which reminds me:

• Regarding “The One Who Waits”: wouldn’t it be hilarious if it’s someone they keep mentioning, who they didn't use in Tales of the TARDIS, and who has a very good reason to hate the Doctor...? Just saying. 

• Oh I’ve already seen the Christmas special, by the way. It’s brilliant. And really: David who?

“Are you Donna...?” Alternatively, “Oh, this is therapeutic” *punches self in the face*.

Well, this is more like it. Firstly, it looks expensive. The TARDIS actually landing in an apple tree (the 1978 version of this was an offhand joke; now we actually see it). The credits which, yes, okay, they were there last week but I didn’t notice. The massive, massive spaceship, with bits that move. You can see the money on screen

Secondly, it’s a scary, high concept puzzle box story of the sort I’m an absolute sucker for, the kind of thing Moffat used to write in the first RTD era. It’s obviously a conceptual sequel to Midnight – possibly literally even the same species; a formless thing that needs to copy to exist. But it works on a second watch too, because it’s not just twist, there are also loads of great performance bits, character stuff and even emotion in there, too.

And it is so, so unsettling. The eldritch horror of the slightly wrong copies. The terrifying giant versions of the regulars. The bit where they get tangled together and block the corridor. Donna melting and the Doctor as this weird spider creature thing. Even the moments where Donna drops to the floor to count the salt, or when the Doctor – the real Doctor – just screams helplessly and starts kicking the wall. I can’t remember the last time Who felt this weird.

I love the space-y, awe-filled score – this also feels like one of the thread of “space is SCARY” stories that the modern show sometimes throws at us (The Impossible Planet, Waters of Mars, Oxygen, etc). The spaceship outside the universe reminds me of the concept of Hindmost, from Lance Parkin’s 35th anniversary novel The Infinite Doctors.

I was momentarily disappointed before broadcast, when everyone involved started going “Shit shit our ultra-secret publicity strategy means everyone’s expecting surprise guest stars”. Literally all the clips we’d seen were from the first nine minutes of the episode, and for about 10 seconds I got over excited by the presence of an actress literally named “Susan Twist” because, if ever we were getting the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan back, possibly fighting some Daleks, this had to be it. Carole Anne Ford’s not gonna be around forever. (Oh hang on that casting is a deliberate troll isn’t it?) In the event, though, I loved that we just got a proper, uncomplicated Tennant and Donna episode. I also love that Jimbo the robot was the only image we had from the episode and he barely does anything, while also doing the most important thing in the story.

I’m not entirely sure I understand why the destruction had to happen slowly – sure, slowing your thoughts down keeps the monsters from copying you, but once the captain is dead why does that still matter? Also there is no way is it gonna take three years for that robot to walk down that corridor. But, these are nitpicks. This was the first “f*ck yeah, Doctor Who”-level story, the sort that makes me think “Wow I didn’t know it could do THAT” since, what, Fugitive? That was slightly ruined by the failure to do anything with it though, so... Demons of the Punjab? World/Falls? It’s been years, whatever it is. We are so back.

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Other things:

• I rewatched it on iPlayer, and it feels like they fixed the soundmix that stopped me hearing bits of the dialogue on the first go? Or maybe my ears are cleaner now. Very weird that the show is now split into three chunks (20th century, 2005-22, 2023-), mind.

• So, the Newton casting... I don’t care that he’s brown. He is, indeed, very hot, the bastard. But it does feel a bit odd to have a weird comedy prologue on a scary episode. Is this another note from Disney? Anyway: last week was a repeat of a 1980 comic, this time it’s a realisation of a one liner from 1978.

• “I once spent three years in orbit...” The HADS bit is annoying, but much less annoying than the last time they were used.

• How many episodes have that sense of building dread as the motor of the plot? (It’s a whole 23 minutes before the script shows its hand.) The only one I can think of is Earthshock 1. Arguably Androzani, or Inferno, perhaps?

• There are some lovely design touches – Donna in an orange room, Tennant in a blue one, hot and cold, the dominant colours of the RTD1 and Moffat/Smith eras respectively. There’s an R2D2 look to bits of spaceship. Slightly in awe that Doctor Who looks like *this* now.

• For the second week running we get a conversation between characters separated by plexiglass.

• Assorted random character observations. The cast in this are in their early 50s, barely younger than William Hartnell in 1963 (he would have been 57 I think?). The Doctor has three doubles (acting, beast, contortionist). I love him tasting something to check if it’s dangerous. Why does the Doctor only have one sonic anyway? The last time we saw Donna drive was Turn Left. The moment when she just stands watching the fireball head towards her waiting for death is incredible.

• Oh, and 14 fancies men. Cool.

• I was surprised at the references to the Timeless Children, Flux and Gallifrey having got complicated – I sort of assumed this stuff would be quietly put away. Now I feel like maybe the plan is to use the events of the previous era as the equivalent of the Time War: a source of angst , a way of giving the immortal trickster god lead a recognisable emotional life.

• “I never thought I’d see you again after all these years...” It’s such a shame we only got one scene of Wilf, but I’m so glad we did that I genuinely screamed when I saw him, scaring the hell out of the dog. The only other time I recall doing that was when my beloved texted me to ask if I was excited about the RTD news, and that was how I found out he was coming back.

• I have never previously encountered the song Wild Blue Younder and do not entirely understand its thematic resonance.

• On the official podcast, RTD asks the hosts to name the equine species the captain. I’m a bit disappointed because I thought it might be a Jell, a native of the planet Jelledge, the only planet in the entire Whoniverse to be named after me, and this rules it out. 

• All that chat about whether the ramps in the TARDIS were so that Ruth Madeley could go in there, and it turns out they’re just to tip evil Donna out. LOL.

• WTF is with the “mavity” joke and is this going anywhere.

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“I would burn down the world for you, darling.”

Although, “Under my jurisdiction there will be no violence until I deem it fit and proper” feels like a pretty great summary of the Doctor’s character

A perfectly normal thing about me is that I often feel weirdly nervous the first time I watch some new Who. Especially the start of a new era, I want it to be good so much that I end up not enjoying it even when it is. (I didn’t think The Eleventh Hour was good the first time, and that’s pretty near perfect.)

Anyway, I wasn’t sure, but once I’d watched it a second time – also perfectly normal – this time knowing the *shape*, I really liked it. It has a sort of movie vibe to it, like, I dunno, Voyage of the Damned – and absolutely not like Legends of the Sea Devils – all Broad Strokes, Big Moments and Soaring Music, but crammed into an hour. Structurally it’s also sort of Rose isn’t it? That was using the plot of Spearhead.. as a framework, leaving RTD free to focus on the new companion plot… This is using the 1980 comic as a framework for the old companion plot.

It is also a very weird 2008 throwback, feeling like an extra episode from the late RTD era and clearly aimed at finishing a story from 15 years ago that RTD now regrets. It’s not a jumping on point, it’s a jumping back in point. I do wonder whether the pre-credits, with the Doctor and Donna talking directly to camera to remind everyone what happened, was added later when someone realised they were assuming too much knowledge. 

It really doesn’t mess about: without that pre-credits, literally the first thing that happens is that the TARDIS lands and the Doctor walks into Donna. I love that her family is now set up as just uncomplicatedly loving and caring – that Sylvia is very clearly still Sylvia, but has mellowed, that she worries about doing right by her trans granddaughter. (Also that Donna would obviously kill for her Rose.)

I’d sort of forgotten how RTD doesn’t bother with huge swathes of plot, it’s just emotional logic plus technobabble. How the goodies win matters less than the emotional journey they go on to do it. That also annoyed me a bit the first viewing: on the second, I was entirely won over by Tate’s delivery on, “But it will kill you.” “Okay.” 

I was momentarily annoyed by Tennant’s delivery of, “Why does it have to be this!”, until I realised he’s probably deliberately channelling “It’s not fair!” from The End of the Time. Tennant screaming with a companion on the other side of some perspex is also, now I think about it, clearly a deliberate reference.

The resolution of the DoctorDonna thing... I’m not sure mine is the voice anyone needs to hear on whether it was a clever and helpful comment on what it means to be trans or not. But 

a) The idea that it simply wouldn’t have occurred to a male-presenting Time Lord that you can just give up the magical powers feels mildly gender essentialist which, hmm. But it is also a sort of mea culpa that maybe RTD messed up the end of his best season by writing a story in which the Doctor removed the agency from not one but *two* of his companions; and

b) RTD going absolutely all in on using the show to fight bigotry is great.

My favourite moment was when the Meep just says “Meeeeeeeeeeeep” in a sinister growling fashion, like John Finnemore playing the ugly duckling that grew up to be an ugly duck (“Quaaaaaaaaaack”).

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Other things:

• I enjoyed seeing Matt Green, who I knew from my failed attempt to make a name for myself in the Cambridge Footlights, as the TV reporter who gets bundled into a van.

• If you want your house to stay in good nick, don't become a Doctor Who companion. Although the first time I'd missed the bit where the Doctor announces that UNIT's insurance policy is covering the damage – OOOH he's fixing what happened to Dan in Flux too, isn't he! Wonder if he'll fix, y'know, the rest of the universe.

• Talking of UNIT, its land rovers are “defenders”. Cool. (Pals pointed out that “jeeps”, as I originally put, are an entirely different thing.)

• Talking of RTD's patented plot logic: the Sonic being able to make forcefields now is going to be a very useful cheat code. Although, “This is a sonic screwdriver, and if it's good at one thing, it’s.... resonating concrete” feels weirdly like it was meant to sound iconic rather than a gag.

• Also, the self-repairing lava canyons that almost destroy London are fucking hilarious.

• Sylvia says something nice to the Doctor!

• The UNIT building is on the site of Lloyds of London. I spent ages working this out so you need to know, too.

• There is clearly more to come on the “why did this face come back” thing. Also it’s implied that the Meep is working for the Toymaker? Maybe there will be Meep toys for Christmas after all.

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But since I’ve done the first 60 years’ of material I’m not going to stop now, so: here’s my take on the unnamed Children in Need special.

Broadcast: November 2023

Watched: Would you believe it? Also November 2023

My second thought about this is that you can feel Steven Moffat’s influence all over it, even though he’s nowhere near it. There have been Doctor Who sketches for a long time. There have been Doctor Who mini-episodes for a long time. Moffat, whose first televised Doctor Who was The Curse of Fatal Death of course, was the first writer to realise they could be the same thing: you could write what was, essentially, a sketch rather than a story, within continuity, and release that. The “TARDISodes” and “minisodes” we got during the first RTD era attempted something serious in three minutes or less, but that’s really hard to do: much easier to make some gags. This is RTD running with that model.

Which is why, shortly after I had my first thought about this episode – “Blimey, it’s David Tennant’s Doctor again!” – he was saying “Genesis of the Daleks” out loud, in dialogue, and helping invent his nemesis by providing a sink plunger. As you do. It’s all a bit “First time as tragedy...”

The scene does at least answer the question of whether the 14th Doctor is going to be noticeably different from the 10th. Which isn’t really a question because why would you bring Tennant and one of his companions back and get him to play a completely different character? But nonetheless.

The ~discourse~ surrounding the episode – based on RTD’s statement on Doctor Who Unleashed, that in retrospect it’s a bit off to have disabled villains, so Davros walks now – threw me a bit. Partly because I just assumed this scene was set before whatever accident damaged him in the first place; partly because I’d never really registered that Davros *was* in a wheelchair, I’m just so familiar with him and his look that I see it as half a Dalek. But it’s not for me to say, and if this makes anyone feel better then fair enough, really. Perhaps, given that the last time we saw Davros, he was mucking about with regeneration energy he’ll be able to walk in future, too. 

Other things:

• Julian Bleach is now I think the longest serving Davros? He’s been playing him 15 years.

• The other guest star, Mawaan Rizman, is lovely in this. Also reading his Wikipedia page to find out where I recognised him from (Taskmaster) led me to this: “In 2014, he appeared alongside his mother, Shahnaz, in a YouTube video which resulted in his mother gaining the attention of Bollywood and eventually landing a role in the Indian television series Yeh Hai Mohabbatein (This Is Love).” How great is that? 

• Someone, probably Jim, told me that the claw was actually part of the original design for the Daleks and got cut because it cost too much money. So there you go.

• Jim was definitely responsible for the original title of this post, before I spotted it had a semi-official name, “The Legs of Davros”. Someone else suggested “The Leg-ends of Davros”. 

• “The Klade” were a suspiciously anagrammatical humanoid race in some of Lance Parkin’s Doctor Who novels published during the interregnum.

• “The timelines and the canon are rupturing”. Hmm. I do wonder what that might mean.

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Anyway, that’s enough of that. You can listen to the Bunker’s Doctor Who special here. And if you really want to know what my favourite things are in every year of Doctor Who so far you’ll have to check out my other newsletter:

(It’s behind the paywall but there’s a special offer on.)

Happy birthday, Doctor.

The Power of the Doctor

Broadcast: October 2022

Watched: November 2023

“Daleks! On the same day as the Master and the Cybermen!” Alternatively: “Okay. Don’t get cocky.”

I finished my run through of All Of Doctor Who in time to watch this immediately afterwards. At the time it felt like an utterly incoherent mess, only saved by a few moments that could have been written specifically for those of us who’ve been fans for decades, and to hell with the modern audience. On a second viewing it, well, still feels like that. But I can see what it’s *trying* to do.

It is quite clearly an attempt to do the Biggest Ever Episode: Cybermen invading UNIT HQ! A mysterious message from the Daleks! The Master trying to take the Doctor’s place! All three teaming up! Eight different doctors! So many companions I’ve lost count! A thing that looks like a death star in the sky above Siberia in 1916! 

It feels, in an observation shamelessly nicked from my friend Steffan, like the carnivalesque Five Doctors to Day’s more focused Three Doctors. (Also, LOL that someone clearly went: “Shit, what worked in a special before? I know: paintings!”) Word is that Chibnall wrote it not knowing if the show would continue, and that would make sense since it does make a fair stab at being the last ever episode. It’s just unfortunate that it does so with all the lack of logic, characterisation or craft we’ve come to expect from the man.

Okay, good things first: the opening sequence on the space train is lots of fun, and does something with both the cyber/TIme Lord hybrid things and the regulars. Fair play to Dan for going, “Yeah actually I don't want to die so I’m going home.” Making it possible for companions to quit because they’ve just had enough once again might be one of Chibnall’s better contributions to the show.

Ace and Tegan machine gunning Cybermen is cool. Sacha Dhawan, as ever, is the best thing in it, having the time of his life: the bit where he dances to Ra Ra Rasputin goes on for a whole minute, literally to the second, in a way that makes me wonder if this was the maximum they were allowed to licence. (LOL at the Dalek and Cyberman sharing a glance at his behaviour.)

I quite like that the traitor Dalek *isn’t* lying to the Doctor, that it really is betraying his species but that they’re using him as a lure. Love that they then lock the Doctor in the traitor’s casing: pretty neat inversion of the cliffhanger from Village of the Angels. “I was just thinking we could call this... The Master’s Dalek Plan,” says the Master, in a clue we are in for an absolute avalanche of Stuff For The Fans.

All this is fine, in a dumb Chibnall kind of way. But around this point on broadcast, when I was about five minutes behind, a friend started texting me stuff like “OH MY F*CKING GOD” because he was watching live and a load of past Doctors had just shown up and to be fair that was pretty much my reaction too. The Guardians of the Edge bit feels a bit like the mindscape from Timewyrm: Revelation, or the memory TARDIS from Tales of the TARDIS, or various weird stuff like the first Doctor in his garden: an idea that previous incarnations live on somewhere if you need them. I’m not sure this will make much sense to a normal audience, but, y’know, screw those guys. 

Because I am not the normal audience, and for me it was f*cking brilliant. McCoy and McGann bickering. The 5th Doctor saying “Adric” on television in 2022, and the emotion he gets into that one word. McCoy and Aldred finally getting a goodbye scene. (Davison is quite obviously the best one, although McCoy runs him very close.)

And then the other surprise, the companion support group. I always said if William Russell appeared as Ian in Doctor Who again I’d cry, thinking I was joking, and what do you know, I was right: has a fictional character ever returned after 57 years off screen before? (Maureen O’Brien might have just beaten him by returning as Vicki for Tales of the TARDIS, but that wasn’t broadcast, so.) It might also be Chibnall’s biggest legacy – bigger than the timeless child stuff or Division – because it’s  a very useful trick if you want to bring back any companions in future without explaining very much (ooh look, here comes Mel). The thought occurs that one of the striking things about Day of the Doctor was how it doesn’t do the obvious “The Doctor really needs his friends!” story, which this really, really does. There’s even a bit where the Doctor makes them all press buttons in the TARDIS like Journey’s End.

So, yes, loads to enjoy! Against that, though, it all gets a bit Chibnall.

The plot is extremely hard to follow, if not completely meaningless. I entirely missed the setting up of the Daleks trying to blow up a volcano in Bolivia, we were suddenly just there. The way the Master appears in two different guises in two different time zones while his TARDIS is somewhere else means for a while I was convinced we were watching two different versions of him, but no it doesn’t make sense unless he’s nipping between the two, somehow, adding or removing a beard as he goes.

Characters just appear in the narrative and we’re expected to know who they are and what they mean. Vinder flies out of nowhere. Ace and Tegan show up after literal decades, with very little set-up and what there is is as subtle as a brick (“Just cos it’s only three decades for me”). And oh look it’s Graham trying to fight Daleks under a mountain. Of course it is.

It’s also very Chibnall that there’s a mysterious child who has absolutely nothing to do with the other mysterious child we’re all waiting for some plot resolution on, but is a previously unsuspected life form with a Q and an X in its name.

I was going to put the Doctor regenerating into the Master into the meaningless/”FFS, Chibnall” box, but actually I’ve been turned around on it. Okay, the technobabble is nonsense, it’s not that clear what’s going on. But I quite like the idea that this is the end point of his obsession: that he wants to occupy the Doctor’s place, that he’s basically trying to make it *his* show, complete with the mash up, old school Doctor outfit and a companion of his own. (There’s a bit like that with the Monk in the OFFICIAL 30th anniversary story No Future – “I’ll make Ace my companion! I’ll make her love ME!”) So this bit gets a pass.

The thing that really annoys me though is that, even in her last story, the Thirteenth Doctor is just... passive. When one of her other selves says, “Quite the strength of character, this incarnation”, it really annoys me because she’s just walked into an obvious trap and now has to be reminded not to just give up. There’s no strength of character on show. 

There’s no resolution of Thasmin, either: when she’s being forced to regenerate the Doctor screams Yaz’s name, and later Yaz saves her life, twice, but then she just... dumps her? She all but says “Oh yeah there’s a new production team, they want a blank slate, sorry.”

Jo Martin appears for one scene, walks in and owns the place in a way Whitaker very rarely did. I just feel like this team cast the first female Doctor and then wasted her.

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Oh well. Other things:

• There’s loads of travel by captions. (Siberia, 1916! London, 2022! Naples!) One last time, eh, Chris?

• Ashad is alive again because the Master cloned him something something.

• The Master literally taunts the Doctor by copying the TARDIS and making the sign read, “Hahahahahah”. It’s hardly the end of Turn Left, but nonetheless, fun.

• “Last time I saw you you were half cat.” “A man’s allowed to experiment.” I enjoyed this line enough that I don’t even mind it sort of screws essentially every other version of Ace’s fate from the tangle of wilderness years continuity.    

• Forced regeneration is the ultimate Time Lord punishment, like in The War Games. Cool. Also the Master mocks the Doctor for not knowing how many times it happened to her, just like Chibnall mocks us by not telling us. Talking of which:

• Jo Martin’s last lines are “I guess that’s me done. See you around.” FFS Chibnall.

• “That’s why you manifested here – to remind me, there’s always a way, things always work out” bloody hell Doctor is that all you’ve got?

• The Doctor passes the hologram AI implant off as static. So many people implant things in companions in the Chibnall era without permission that it feels like one of his big themes.

• The bit where the Jodie hologram takes on the faces of all the others is bloody nightmarish.

• Kate nearly ends up a cyberman. Just like her old dad.

• Yaz saves the Doctor’s life and can fly the TARDIS, and the Doctor still dumps her. Threatened, I assume. Wild to think she’s now the longest-running companion.

• Ace and Graham flirting. Eww. 

Huh. I’ve just realised I didn’t even mention the regeneration. It happens for a rubbish reason, it takes ages, and then it’s the Doctor, but possibly not the one you were expecting.

And we’re done.

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Well. I might at some point write up the Cushing movies (one of which I watched last year and hated so much it put me off the other). I almost certainly will do the new episodes, or some random thoughts. But after something absurd like 356 of these posts that is, basically, that.

If you want to go round again, though, some crazy kids have launched a podcast...

“The Who Watch Podcast is an attempt by two physically young yet mentally weatherbeaten fans to watch every episode of Doctor Who. Each week, Beth Axford and David Chipakupaku dissect a story, and find all the fun, silly, and camp things within it. They’ve just begun season one (1963-64), so you can join them on their ride through time and space if you’re a newbie, or a seasoned vet.”

I have listened and enjoyed it very much. But then, I would, wouldn’t I?

Listened: October 2022

I re-listened to this, partly because I loved it, but mostly so I didn’t end my three-and-a-half year pilgrimage on Legend of the Sea Devils because bloody hell how bleak would that have been. At the time it felt like a weirdly-shaped Doctor-lite episode; now it feels more like a spin-off. So I’ve got no plans for a write-up of season 2, sorry.

“Didn’t you do your Duke of Edinburgh?” “Yeah, not in a skirt, though.”

No, I’m not gonna do individual episodes, even though they’ve all got titles, are you mad?

Anyway! It doesn’t go anywhere, at least some of the interesting things about it are cliches - it’s Love & Monsters, or TNG: Lower Decks. But it’s still hugely entertaining and thought provoking in precisely the way so much of this era failed to be, and it works - possibly even better - the second time round.

The podcast bit is almost too accurate: every time we hear it it’s a bit shit and self indulgent (Rani Chandra, in the middle of an alien attack: “I’ve heard your podcast, it’s good! Okay it’s fine. And you all need better mics. But-”) 

But it’s the right fit for a deeply progressive and queer story that’s fundamentally about the validity of alternative perspectives. Cleo, who it becomes clear fairly quickly is the lead, is a great character. Probably the single best moment in it is when a man in a uniform tries to intimidate her and she furiously replies that she’s scared every time she uses a public loo, so try harder. Her brother Jordan is great, too, if a bit wish fulfilment-y maybe?

It’s also *incredibly* fannish, proper wilderness years level stuff, using existing continuity as fuel. Its ramble through Who continuity from the perspective of an outsider reminds me of the 1996 novel Who Killed Kennedy - so much that I genuinely wonder if Juno Dawson, who devised it, has read it? It also feels like it was made by people who grew up with New Who in a way my lot did with the old series: it’s like hearing a generational shift, live.

If I have a complaint, it is that I’m not sure that story and theme lineup. Is it about people forgetting you/vanishing when you become your real self? Doesn’t quite mesh?

A question I had while listening the first time is - is this about resetting the universe? Like the Time War or the crack in the universe? But no, they wouldn’t do that in a radio spin off, so it’s just a fairly inconsequential space virus thing of course. 

LOL that “The Doctor destroyed the universe and didn't even notice” feels like a comment on Chibnall’s writing process, though.

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Other things...

• Juno Dawson is lead writer but there are seven others. I'm not sure how that works, but cool. [It works fine, past Jonn, it’s entirely inexplicable: you're just trying to hammer this into the shape of a story not a season because you've been writing these notes for years and have gone slowly mad.]

• Some continuity. Larry from Blink doesn't marry Sally. Vastra’s Jenny is long dead. Both Partners in Crime and Smith & Jones are dated to 2008. Dr Morganstern from the latter story became a conspiracy theorist; now he is a nice man explaining how women be crazy sometimes. Hilariously, he novelised Smith & Jones, lol.

• Rose was Cleo’s baby sitter, which is how she's involved, because her dad died during the red hatching... but that happened in Blink, which was Martha? Hmm.

• The portrayal of UNIT is really interesting - they sort of show us two consciously different versions, the scary authorities in uniform one, and the fun, progressive “Hey guys, let's learn about aliens!” one. The recruitment ad we hear makes that explicit: “If you have a passion for the unexplainable OR a passion for shooting weapons AT the unexplainable…”

• Also, in the UNIT basement there are 862 objects though 97 are completely missing. LOL.

• A thing I am not sure about - we’re meant to be happy at the end when Abby leaves her terrible controlling boyfriend to be with Shawna. But… isn't she also kind of controlling? She gets really annoyed with Abby every time she doesn't do what she wants, shits on her interests, accuses her of betrayal...? Can't work out if this is deliberate. [From season 2, in which Sawhna continues to be toxic, it is still entirely unclear.]

• “I am Silurian and yes I like to wear dresses.” Presumably they re-cast Vastra because Neve Macintosh wasn’t available? Anyway, Doon Mackichen is great.

• The running “alien foetus in a jarA joke is amusing. The way they build Vastra’s advisor up as if it’s the Doctor but then it isn’t, it’s just an alien foetus in a jar, is annoying.

• There is a slight lack of unity between the “Cleo's dad disappeared/was murdered by aliens/her mum couldn't cope with her being trans” stuff, but that’s me being picky.

• One slight problem with this on broadcast, that didn't bother me now... if you make anything 10 parts long it will feel important, when it’s just another silly Doctor Who story whose ending is inevitably nonsense. This is not helped by the brilliant cliffhanger to part 9 - Cleo thinking she's vanished - is immediately undone.

• The story ends with the Doctor discussed as a sort of guardian or possibly a literal god... Basically, it nicks the ending from Last of the Time Lords and message from Twice... Told you this thing was drowning in continuity.

• Rani has written for the New Statesman, so the thought occurs that in the Doctor Who universe I probably spent 2019 dealing with her angry emails about her invoices not having been paid.

Oh crap, I’ve just realised I need to rewatch Power of the Doctor now.

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Watched: September 2022

“We’re never gonna get that beach holiday, are we?” Alternatively: “Sorry about his outfit.”

Enjoyed it more this time, now I knew it was one where I had to just switch my brain off. The first time it was crippled by the Victory of the Daleks problem: it’s not only bad in itself, it takes an amazing concept (Sea Devils and 19th century Chinese pirates!) and utterly wastes it on some generic action blah. 

Also, it’s not even a special! It’s normal episode length! It’s just an episode! Bah humbug.

Okay, some good things... “Land parasite”; the flying ship; cutting from Dan’s “Let me do the talking here” to him being hung upside down; the TARDIS on the bottom of the sea; taking Doctor Who somewhere new.

Against that, though, the bad things really pile up in this one: 

• The flying sea devil (what?);

• The insane but undiscussed death toll; 

• The sea devil costume still can’t move well enough to give them character; 

• People repeatedly saying, “That’s not possible”; 

• The Doctor just leaving Dan in 1807 with a, “Well he shouldn’t wander off”; 

• Ji Hun spending three centuries in suspended animation so he can be a plot token and sacrifice himself in the Doctor’s place (he literally runs into a scene he wasn’t in for no reason to do it);

• Trying to make a mystery out of “Where’s the ship?” and another mystery out of “How did the Sea Devils get a ship?” at the same time.

Several of those things, you’ll notice, aren’t merely bad moments, they’re structural. There’s an unnerving quantity of bad radio dialogue, people just describing what they can see, even on television. People just randomly arrive where the plot needs them, to see exactly what they need to see, with no set up. It feels like they filmed a synopsis.

Oh, and then there’s the Doctor friendzoning Yaz, giving her a load of bullshit about how she’s brilliant but she doesn’t do that sort of thing, when we know she does etc. The conversation on the beach later (“I might. But if I do fix myself to somebody I know, sooner or later, it’ll hurt”) would fix it except Whtiaker has absolutely been playing it as “not f*cking interested”.

Unless - given the “I wish this would go on forever” bit - maybe we’re meant to think the Doctor knows she’s going to die and is actually protecting Yaz? That’d almost be clever. [SPOILERS: This is not what’s happening.]

As penultimate stories for a Doctor go, it’s hardly Waters of Mars or Day or World/Time is it? It’s not even sodding Boom Town.

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Other things:

• It’s not a 50th anniversary sea devils story, it’s a coincidence. Weird. 

• Madame Ching’s delivery of “Before I kill you!” is an early sign we’re in for some utter shit.

• Rumour is that Ella Road had very little to do with it. Hmmm.

• The TARDIS lands on a beach! It’s only watching it straight after Eve did I realise this is meant to be a running joke as that’s what they were aiming for last time. Also that they’re specifically trying to solve the mystery of the Flor de la Mar.

• Dan is 42. (John Bishop is 55.) He is also a mass murderer.

• In rep company news, the chief sea devil is played by Karvanista.

• The bit where the kid hugs Madame Ching, who got his father killed, is the dumbest f*cking thing I’ve seen in ages.

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Watched: September 2022

Two quotes to sum up the two problems with it: 

“Yes, that makes sense!” “Does it, because I thought I was losing my mind?”

Alternatively, “That is so stalkery!” “I prefer shy.”

It’s basically on a par with all Chibnall’s New Year Dalek episodes... Great concept (“Groundhog Day with Aisling Bea and Daleks”), great trailer, massively wastes it all of that, but still actually fun in a way his stuff doesn’t always manage to be. 

Problem number one is: it does absolutely nothing with the gradually closing time loop other than “kill everyone a lot”. Everyone in it remembers everything. It also just doesn’t feel that thought through: if the Daleks don’t die why does time reset for them, too? If everyone’s coming back a minute later on each run why do they all appear in the same place again? And how does this fit with the whole “Nick doesn’t survive past five to” bit?

Problem number two: it’s sociologically interesting and maybe a bit weird how quickly awkward unrequited love stories have gone from “sweet” to “creepy”, but we are where we are, and this definitely feels creepy. Nick is clearly intended to be a nice guy, in the genuine, not internet, sense of the word: the bit where he tries to save Sarah and just assumes she was also trying to save him is great, as is his sacrificing himself in a doomed attempt to show he’s not a creep. But no matter how you look at it, Nick keeping bits of dead relationships in a storage unit does feel like he’s keeping their bodies in a chest freezer. Just throw things away! 

Arguably, problem three is it lacks the scale of Revolution, but after the chaos of Flux this might not actually be a problem at all.

For all that, it’s a fun idea, the guest cast are likeable, and also it’s kind of nice after Flux to have some straightforward Dalek nonsense with some good jokes in it. If I was the sort to grade things it’d be a solid 7/10.

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Loads of good bits, to be fair: 

• Mrs Doyle as Aisling Bea’s mum! Aww.

• Dalek shaped hole in the door, cool.

• Weird Jeff is one of the great unseen characters. (The bits with the different stuff in his room is great.)

• “Daleks do not have managers.” “Well maybe that’s part of the problem.”

• Nick, ducking, so the Daleks kill each other.

• Yaz finally snapping and yelling “Stop leaving us all the time”!

Bad bits:

• The first time the Doctor and co die is INCREDIBLY stupid, with her just assuming the sonic will stop the Daleks. Still, nice way into opening credits, 9 minutes in. Even Moffat didn’t do 9 minute intros did he?

• “Ex... terminated.”

Probably bad bits, let’s see where they land: 

• Thasmin. [Bingo]

• “My actions are catching up with me, I will not let you die because of decisions I’ve taken” - could... could there be a plan? Surely not? [It was NOT!]

Other things: 

• “I can fix this!” “Then why haven’t you?” Sarah sums up the entire Chibnall era.

• The Doctor resetting the TARDIS to deal with remnants of the Flux feels like a bigger deal than the show seems to think it is - like it’s about the universe still not being right. Also the Daleks are determined to kill the Doctor as revenge for the end of Flux. So there we go.

• Genuinely did not recognise the guy from Woman Who Fell at the end, not sure if anyone else would have, baffled as to what Chibnall is trying to say here.

• I do wonder if the decision to kill the Doctor and a bunch of other people over and over again is the Chibnall equivalent of Moffat’s “Why won’t you just let me die”.

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Watched: September 2022

“But seriously, how am I here?” 

Alternatively: “None of this is possible.”

Then again: “You any idea what she’s talking about?” “Not a clue. Normal service resumed.”

Or, last but not least: “F*cking hell.” (That one’s not a quote from the episode, as such.)

So this is Chibnall’s Journey’s End, in that it has multiple Doctors and about 27 people in the TARDIS and is utterly mad. Unfortunately, it lacks the much loved characters and airpunch moments that made that episode great as well as as self-indulgent mess, so the results are a load of nonsense. The first time it took me two hours to watch, because I was bored; it wasn’t quite that bad this time, but unlike Survivors..., which works far better when you know accept it’s not going anywhere and just enjoy the ride, this still isn’t that much fun.

I fear that what follows isn’t very coherent. I’m not sure that’s entirely my fault.

Firstly, we get a very long intro (four minutes, almost Moffat length), mostly dedicated to ensuring that people one again just magically appear where they have to – Kate Stewart in the tunnels, the Doctor in Karvanista’s ship AND next to Yaz AND being stuck at Division with Swarm, and so forth.

The three doctors bit (again: like Journey’s End, but bigger!) is weird since it doesn’t do anything except having them in different places. For, what, the 17th time this season, it feels like a literalisation of the problem of Chibnall being over-extended, having given himself too many things to do off screen/too many plots to tie up on screen. It’s also a good cheat to get the Doctor out of impossible situations – throw another Doctor at it. (The really weird thing is: wasn’t there a rumour of the Doctor being split into three parts in season 11, that never happened? Huh.)

Then we get either the second or third Sontaran invasion of the season depending on how you count. It’s fun watching the Sontarans wandering around the sights of Liverpool; but the sugar addiction plot is, not for the first time this season, a weird tonal mismatch with everything else that’s going on.

Another tonal mismatch: “The last of the Lupari”. The Sontarans *commit genocide in this episode*, as a minor subplot thrown in to raise the stakes and apparently for no other reason? Still, I suppose Logopolis did it first. Karvanista howling is a good moment.

There’s a lot of technobabble (Diane in the passenger, the Sontarans using psychic energy to something something something). There's a certain amount of mucking around with a fob watch, which is less annoying now we know it doesn’t go anywhere this episode but, since such a big thing is made of hiding it in the TARDIS, presumably will in Power… [Note from after watching Power: ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.] The way Swarm and Azure are still in colour in the black and white Lungbarrow bit is interesting but, it is probably safe to assume, meaningless.

Later, Azure explains that these guys are basically death/destruction/nothingness incarnated, and that their plan is to destroy the universe, wind it back and do it again. This is presumably meant to be the reset switch through which the Doctor undoes the Flux? So it’s a shame no one bothers to, y’know, press it.

One line, to sum up the problem with this entire season: 

“Atropos will be the final point of the Flux destruction. The culmination, where Time will be unleashed. You’ll be our offering. The first Time Lord. A final gift for the Saviour, sacrificed to Time on Atropos as it falls to the Flux. Atropos, then.” 

Good luck making sense of that. I’m not sure Chibnall can either. RTD did nonsense plotting, which reached its peak in Journey’s End, because he prioritised character points. Chibnall just does it to create a stream of incident. 

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Other things:

• The Doctor’s complete team this episode: The Doctor, the Doctor, the Doctor, Yaz, Dan, Kate, Jericho, Claire, Vinder, Bel, Diane, Karvanista, Williamson, possibly an Ood.

• This week, the captions take us to Chile.

• Who are the vanquishers and what is it they vanquish, you ask? The answers are the Sontarans, and “Daleks and Cybermen” respectively. That works: the short ones’ plan is to use the others as inhuman shields. It does rather make the big two look like morons, it must be said, but the Sontarans don’t get away with it because Vinder, Bel and Karvanista do some technobabble.

• There seems to be a whole human resistance movement that we don’t see? We just get Kate saying it exists, and one bloke betraying her. That’s it. 

• Some moments I like: Yaz beating the Sontarans by opening the door to death is pretty cool. Karvanista howling. Jericho accepting his fate (shame he dies due to incompetence rather than heroism, mind).

• “The mad mole? I’ve always wanted to meet you!” She says that a lot doesn’t she? Anyway, I like the way it turns out Joseph Williamson is basically Gary Sparrow in Goodnight, Sweetheart.

• Diana being the only one of the thousands of people in the Passenger who can survive it feels like some convenient bullshit. I can’t make head nor tail of their escape plan. Also, she’s not rejecting Dan at the end she’s saying she needs time to recover from trauma, and he seemingly misreads it. 

• Karvanista was clearly the Fugitive Doctor’s companion, and now hates her because she abandoned him. I ... wonder if that’s where the Yaz story is going? [Again: ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.]

• Oh! Time, whatever that is, appears as yet another Doctor, how lovely. “Beware of the forces that mass against you and their master.” “What do you mean their master?” “F*ck’s sake, Doctor I’m hardly being cryptic.”

So, Flux in conclusion... It’s Trial of a Time Lord again, isn’t it? There’s loads of good material in there, it’s potentially compelling where the previous season was a drag... but it doesn’t hang together at all, and fans will be coming up with fixes and scribbling stories in the margins for decades.

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Anyway. Before that happens we’ve just got time for:

Scream of the Shalka

Released: November-December 2003

Watched: June 2021

I think this sort of highlights Paul Cornell’s genius but also maybe his limits. His 90s Who work is all *brilliant* obviously, but it’s also largely primarily about, er, Doctor Who. Even Human Nature is about playing with and inverting the tropes of Doctor Who, it’s not using Doctor Who to tell a story about something bigger. 

I think maybe that’s kind of what Shalka is? It’s attempting to be forward looking – the new set up of a Doctor sent on missions, with the mysterious robot version of the Master to talk to – but it can’t quite let go of the past. It still assumes that Doctor Who is fundamentally sleepy English villages and UNIT and a posh guy in a frock coat. It’s trying to make old Who palatable for the 21st century, it’s not trying to make Who *rooted* in that new century. It doesn’t have RTD’s willingness to chuck everything out and start all over again. Maybe that was only possible with *the* relaunch? I dunno.

Considering all that, and the fact the animation is pretty ghastly, it’s really good. It actually drew me in, and made me want to see what happened next, which I hadn’t expected. It’s a trad sort of story but on a bigger scale – the Doctor saves the sleepy village halfway through episode one, but then the threat is much bigger; UNIT are global and actually work for the UN. And after ramping the story up and up and up, the final confrontation involves the Doctor singing Cabaret at an alien queen. 

Also, the shorter episodes means you can do a six parter without losing energy. It does still assume a Doctor Who made up of six parters, though.

The thing that’s most impressive about it is the cast, I think. Grant is really not bothering – I have no idea if he would make a decent Doctor because he doesn’t even pretend to try, here. But Sophie Okenedo, Derek Jacobi, Jim Norton, Craig Kelly, who having been Vince in Queer as Folk is one of those people who it feels weird hasn’t been in any other Doctor Who...

Oddly it feels like it might be an influence on RTD and, especially, Moffat, as stuff from this also creeps into the new show. Alison’s qualification to become a companion is basically the same as Martha’s – she’s the one who isn’t scared and wants to fight. Her homebody doctor boyfriend is proto-Rory. Derek Jacobi plays the Master, and what we hear of his backstory is basically Missy in the vault. The Secretary General is almost a character, and the Doctor noisily hates soldiers even while working with UNIT. Also, there’s a bit with the Doctor falling through a wormhole messing about with a phone, which is basically stolen wholesale for Library. 

I very much doubt either Moffat or RTD watched this story after 2003, it just feels like bits of it might have lodged in their brains.

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Other things: 

• “I’m a homeless person myself”, the only bit of this story I could remember, is just as gross as it was at the time. Ditto the way the Doctor blows up his companion’s house and then it’s never mentioned again (oooh! that 

• happens to Martha’s flat too!). [And, since I wrote these notes, Dan’s!]

• Funny how the Shalka are meant to be on most uninhabited worlds and are... never mentioned again, even in any spin off stuff that I’m aware of.

• In the last episode UNIT start bombing civilians and it just... isn’t talked about? Very 2003, that. 

• There’s quite a nice joke about what worms call wormholes. There’s a line about how Britain doesn’t use the Euro “yet”. Sniff.

Aaaaaaand… that’s it for the wilderness years thread. The next story I watched was Rose.

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Watched: September 2022

An utter mess, but surprisingly fun. Contains numerous, largely unrelated, threads, and feels like a lot of space filling. This is extremely strange when there’s so little time left to articulate or progress the massively complicated *actual plot*? Considering which it’s incredibly entertaining.

Anyway, those threads, in descending order of importance. 

1. Division started as a time lord thing, but grew to encompass everything. It thinks the Doctor has mucked up the universe too much, so it’s shutting it down and moving to another, as you do. (This whole plotline feels oddly like one of those literalisations of Chibnall’s writing process this year keeps on throwing up?) 

Oh, and it’s run by the Doctor’s adoptive mum, who at one point says, “When you knew the truth you’d never stop hounding us” – kind of making Division *everything*, which is weirdly what Moffat was wrongly accused of doing with the Clara plot. This is surely the biggest thing ever to happen to the Doctor, something which reframes everything else? 

I wonder if anyone will care.

On the upside... the scene in which Tacteun offers the Doctor a choice of her memories and rejoining division, or going back to save the universe, is actually quite a good moral dilemma.

(It was at this point I realised my bits on these episodes have taken an entirely different format to the other 800 and something, largely because I’m just trying to understand the plot?)

2. Meanwhile the companions, pointlessly but amusingly, are trapped in the early 20th century for three years, playing Indiana Jones and trying to work out the date the world will end (December 5th, the date of the final episode). I like the Doctor giving Yaz a mission to save the planet in her absence. The bit with the hologram is very Parting/Blink. The comedy hermit is amusing but the shift in tone bizarre.

Anyway, it’s great fun, some of Chibnall’s best material, but none of it goes anywhere. The message to Karvanista is great but... it doesn’t save them.

3. UNIT gets a (new?) origin story! The “corporal/colonel” confusion is dumb as f*ck [no way is Lethbridge-Stewart a corporal at this point], so we can only assume that Robert Bathurst has misspoken. Also, LOL that he only appears in Doctor Who after Moffat left.

Anyway, the Grand Serpent is surprisingly literal! (More Moffat rip offs, this time of Colony Sarff?) It’s hilarious that he goes to all this trouble, taking decades to move himself into heading a committee overseeing UNIT, just so he can shut it down and sell out the Earth. 

Oh look, it’s a Sontaran invasion, those come round more and more frequently these days don’t they.

Still, we get an explanation for closure of UNIT, retconning that bit from Resolution we all assumed was just a joke about austerity? Actually, I assume none of this happens in the non-Flux timeline – partly because the Doctor’s TARDIS just hanging around UNIT for decades, presumably the entire time Pertwee is exiled, would be rubbish; partly because the Sontarans occupied Russia three episodes back. But oh well, that’s Lance’s problem.

4. Karvanista is still protecting the earth, Bel is still somehow running round space being badass while pregnant: this week she gets too close in a lupari craft, some plot happens.

5. Vinder is still looking for her, runs into Swarm and Azure, which would obviously happen in an infinite universe. “Your role here is simple. You are space. We are time.” Do you think Chibnall knows what this means? Anyway, he gets captured, meets Di, they plot revenge. 

As 50 minutes of Doctor Who this is brilliant. As episode 5 of 6 it’s utterly baffling.

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Other things:

• I like Tacteun’s hat.

• Also, even if it does undo one of the best cliffhangers ever, I like the idea that the angels encase the Doctor in an angel purely to freak her out; sadism is gradually becoming the angels’ thing.

• An ood! Love an ood. 

• Apparently the flux destroyed many galaxies, suggesting that The Halloween Apocalypse had the highest body count of any episode ever. The Doctor talks about how she can reverse this. She never actually does.

• Joseph Williamson’s tunnels helpfully connect bits of plot, which makes it even funnier that in War... people literally just vanish and appear elsewhere, they don’t use the plot device explicitly set up for that purpose. (Why couldn’t the TARDIS implode dropping them all in the tunnels or something?

• “Any particular reason?” “Death, sir! Endless death!” “That’s persuasive.” Both Steve Oram and Kevin McNally are brilliant.

• Oh thats what Swarm was up to with Passenger, harvesting energy to build a device that would take them to Division... where he immediately kills Tacteun, lol.

• It’s funny how Jemma Redgrave, despite being a Redgrave, is not actually that great at acting.

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Listened: May-June 2021

Disc One

Now this is more like it.

...

Seriously. Give me mental over dull any time. Okay, it’s basically meaningless, and it’s hard to work out what’s happening – to defeat Zagreus who doesn’t exist the TARDIS visualises anti-time cold war something something? But it keeps throwing stuff at you and doesn’t seem to think it’s Serious Drama rather than A Load Of Old Nonsens. Perhaps on disc three that’ll change, and they’ll be trying to convince me This Matters again, but at the moment it’s quite fun.

Also – reading reviews, the thing that seems to have annoyed a lot of people in 2003 is the single best thing about it, e.g. they’ve cast all the Doctors and companions as other people. That’s actually *interesting*, but obviously BF sold it as a multi-Doctor story because somebody, somewhere, is an idiot.

The re-use of the cast does have the unfortunate effect of showing that a) half the female companions (Ward, Wills, Bryant) have the exact same “I Graduated Drama School, You Know” voice, and b) Peter Davison is a vastly better actor than almost anyone else who was ever in 20th century Doctor Who.

The Doctor seeing a load of alternate universes feels a neat way of dealing with the continuity clashes of this era – I wonder why this used to annoy me so much? [It really did, BF’s attempts to claim its stories took place in an entirely different timeline to the books used to make me *rage*.]

For all [co-writer] Gary Russell’s professed hatred of the books, Zagreus (character) is basically Grandfather Paradox [the leader of Faction Paradox, recurring villains in the eighth Doctor books c1997-2000] and Zagreus (story) is basically Timewyrm:Revelation.

The fact the “previously on” at the start of Zagreus is 7 minutes long encapsulates everything that’s wrong with the BF approach. Overly complicated and underly edited. 

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Discs 2 & 3

The second disc is still mental, but less divertingly so. The third disc is just boring. I’d still take this over something like Sword of Orion, I don’t think it deserves its reputation as the worst BF audio ever, but the novelty wore off.

Anyway. There’s something quite upsetting about the idea of vampire Colin, but it’s quite funny to give him a line about not being hungry. Even more upsetting: making McCoy’s character a dirty old man. Took me until the second half of disc two to realise that the companion actors are being paired with their Doctor, right up to giving Bryant and Langford two roles each. The bit with the theme park robots at war is actually quite funny, even if a) both Aldred and Bowerman suck in it, and b) it’s literlaly the Meltdown episode of Red Dwarf isn’t it. Oh, they do the theme tunes by Doctor too, what fabulous attention to detail.

I entirely missed the idea McCoy is meant to be Walt Disney. I did enjoy Langford as an evil fairy, though.

Another idea repeating itself and/or being stolen – the Divergence are basically the Ferutu aren’t they? [Another villanous race from the books, this time those of Lance Parkin.]

You know what I said about how BF never bothered to give another explanation for how Romana got back to n-space? They do here, it’s rubbish. They give her an alternative first meeting with Leela, too. The two of them fighting makes me want to pull my eyes out. Oh, and Rassilon is the villain, so I was wrong about that as well. I quite like Courtney playing a deranged, vengeful TARDIS, though, he’s much better than most of the companion actors.

The bit where they mock the “easy as Pi” bit of the Five Doctors annoyed me largely because this story is no Five Doctors.

The ending is... some things that happen? It does feel a bit like the writers looked at Peter Jackson’s Return of the King and thought, “Well it’s alright, but the ending’s over a bit quick”. Doesn’t help that I don’t give a shit about this Doctor or this companion.

The way the old Doctors reassert themselves through these unconnected characters who have their voices is extremely annoying, and even Davison can’t sell it.

Anyway. It’s interesting how many of the different spin off media of this era pick the same few bits of continuity as interesting – who was Rassilon really, Gallifrey’s war with the vampires, an enemy that the Time Lords erased from history, etc. It’s probably good the new regime arrived soon afterwards to give everything a bit of a kick.

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Watched: September 2022

“It does have an element of risk.” “How big an element?” “Well, yeah, pretty big. The only element, really.”

Every season Chibnall likes to give us one or two episodes where you suddenly see how good this era *could* have been, generally written by Vinay Patel or Maxine Alderton, and this is this year’s. 

The atmosphere and look of the episode – the search for a child, the foggy November night, the mildly creepy vicar etc. – all add to the general spookiness. The experiments with a psychic in a house in the country are a shameless lift from Hide. Kevin McNally is brilliant as Jericho, brave and curious and likeable (Peggy hugs him when he lands in 1901; he’s clearly kind to children); you can see why they decided to keep him on for the rest of the season. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Peggy’s guardian Gerald is properly horrible. I love the coldness of Peggy’s “He was never nice to me” when he dies. 

In many ways it’s a sort of remix of angels stories past: they can still chuck people back in time and turn out lights; Clare is having the same sorts of hallucinations as Amy in Time. But there are a few twists (beginning with someone who was kidnapped from the future; a village rather than building; reassembling the drawing, which then comes to life as a burning angel, which is *terrifying*). 

And we do get some new information. “Nobody survives it twice” is a useful clarification. Best of all, it turns out that the angels leave survivors so there are witnesses. If the USP of the Sontarans is that they’re funny, that of the angels is now that they’re cruel. That fits with the central story, of a rogue angel emotionally blackmailing the Doctor to save it from the others... which of course turns out to be a trick.

I like the fact the village in 1901 is already empty, to give it a different vibe from 1967. It’s very headfucky to see it floating in space. I’m not sure it entirely makes sense? Oh well, time is broken I guess. And it is a great bit of imagery, in an episode full of them: the angel on the lie detector drawing’ the angels in the walls; Miss Hayward telling Peggy they’re the same person; the almost final shot of the Doctor becoming an Angel... It’s easily the best cliffhanger of the era.

I’d remembered this as annoyingly incomplete, but actually it’s all there I think? The angels take the village out of time, then sweep out the inhabitants. We know they do it twice, we just don't see it. It’s a story where the angels win.

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Other things:

• Like Halloween Apocalypse (and Waters of Mars, and Big Bang), it’s set on the date of broadcast. 

• Weird to think was the first proper angels story in 9 years?

• The angels waiting for the Doctor helpfully arrange themselves into a capital letter “A”. Of course they do.

• Division isn’t specifically a Time Lord thing, but includes other species? This feels like a retcon but actually is probably just overturning our assumptions.

• I quite like the way the script uses the Flux plot as interludes in angels one – it basically appears at the act breaks? (Or cliffhangers in three part version.)

• Blake Harrison – like Craig Parkinson as the Grand Serpant – is an actor who can trade on things we already know him from, this time to be likeable. He’s great, without actually being anything like Neil from The Inbetweeners.

• Passenger looks like a gimp. It is not clear at this point why the Ravagers want to capture a load of randoms (spoilers: when we find out it’s disappointing and it makes no sense).The “leave a gap between you and the next person or it won’t take” bit is very post-covid.

• Why on earth does the Doctor turn a TV into a security camera? It just makes it easier for the angels to get in.

• Something we haven’t really talked about... the way the very furniture of Doctor Who is dissolving. This week it was the closing credits, with the theme tune off and another scene bursting in halfway through, but the logo has been unravelling for ages. This too won’t go anywhere, obviously, but it’s a cool effect.

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