A Slight Exploitation (The Ghost Monument)
It’s October 14th, 2018. Dave and Fredo are at number one with “Funky Friday.” Calvin Harris and Sam Smith, Kanye West and Lil Pump, Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, and Rita Ora also chart. In news, the IPCC released one of its many reports urgently warning about the disastrous effects of climate change, which is roundly ignored by the major governments of the world. Canada legalized cannabis. Massive flooding takes place in Wales following Storm Callum, and American ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley abruptly resigns.
Meanwhile, on television, the Chibnall era burns through its honeymoon. Were we in the business of reviews—and indeed this is what I did at the time—we might note that second episode are often a little rough, select some bright points, and decide to look forward to Rosa before making our minds up. But that would be postponing the inevitable and we all know it. The Ghost Monument is a bad piece of television. It is bad in ways that most of what Chibnall writes for this show are going to be bad. So we may as well spell that out clearly, get our cards on the table, and start figuring out what we’re going to do to talk about this mess of an era.
Let’s begin with the most basic structural problem. We have a cast of four, two of which have had virtually no introduction, two more of whom are still scant in many ways. And so in their second outing, the priority is surely to give Yaz and Ryan some characterization. Instead of this, Chibnall introduces Angstrom and Epzo, who effectively serve as one-off companions, and thus heavily clog up the characterization for the main team, forcing the script to deal with a six person ensemble for most of its runtime.
There is, of course, an obvious fix for this available, which is to split the action between two camps. Indeed, that’s what the story does in the opening minutes, putting the Doctor and Yaz on Epzo’s ship and Graham and Ryan on Angstrom’s. This would make a lot of sense given that the plot of the story concerns a race, a dynamic that generally relies on, you know, different competitors moving at different speeds as opposed to a homogenous group that sticks together the whole time. To be clear, Chibnall’s approach here isn’t a complete headscratcher—his end theme is the importance of cooperation, and so he has the characters cooperating throughout. But the result is that he sacrifices needed character development and selling the actual premise of the episode in favor of a point that could have been made by other means. It’s inartful—painfully half cooked.
A similar sloppiness occurs on the episode’s back end. We’re at the climactic moment—the finish line of the race is in sight, and Angstrom is poised to win it, leaving Epzo behind. They argue. The Doctor intervenes, declaring that she has a suggestion, and… we hard cut to a few minutes later as Angstrom and Epzo walk in and declare the race a tie. Is it a bad beat? No. But it’s a curious one that foregoes the actual emotional beat that resolves the episode’s conflict—Angstrom and Epzo coming to their agreement—in favor of a thirteen line of dialogue scene where Ilin resists then quickly caves to the idea of a joint victory. It’s difficult to see why you would structure your episode this way—what there is about the second Ilin scene as written that makes it more valuable than the emotional climax of Epzo finally seeing the light. About the only thing—indeed, the outright only thing that’s actually incompatible with that emotional climax—is that single beat of them walking into the tent in unison.
I highlight this relatively minor infelicity because it’s symptomatic of a much larger tendency in Chibnall, which is the ludicrous overvaluation of surprise over other aesthetic reactions. Dropping an actual emotional climax instead of the beat of “what’s the Doctor’s idea… oh!” is an extremely minor example of this, but it’s absolutely endemic across his era. This is, after all, the guy who was fully prepared to change the identity of the murderer in Broadchurch if it leaked, nobody spoiling it apparently being a higher priority than the emotional integrity of the storytelling.
This showed up in Chibnall’s Doctor Who in the form of a complete and deeply dispiriting abandonment of actually promoting the show. Trailers became ten second affairs with little sense of what episodes were about, while Doctor Who Magazine previews that were once treasure troves of quotes and stories became two paragraph detail-free affairs. It became nearly impossible to get excited about the series simply because there was nothing to hang one’s excitement on. Usually it was little more than “it’s Doctor Who” and the identity of a guest star. This would be a puzzling approach in an era where the show was brilliant and firing on all cylinders. From Chibnall, whose episodes at best tended to elicit a shrugged “well that wasn’t too bad,” it’s ruinous.
The official BBC episode description of The Ghost Monument is indicative. “Still reeling from their first encounter, can the Doctor and her new friends stay alive long enough in a hostile alien environment to solve the mystery of Desolation? And just who are Angstrom and Epzo?” Notably, this description consists entirely of questions. More to the point, the questions are extremely stupid. There is not actually a mystery to the identity of Angstrom and Epzo. This is not something hidden over the course of the episode. We find out who they are up front, in the first couple of minutes. This tease for the episode is literally just “what is the episode going to be about?” As for the mystery of Desolation… what, exactly, is the mystery of Desolation? Why the planet is out of place? What happened on it? Neither of these questions have particularly interesting answers—the most you can say about it is “it’s the teeth guys from last episode,” which sets the Stenza up as the big bads of the season. Except that they’re not, Tim Shaw is, and we literally never revisit the question of the Stenza as an overall alien race. They don’t even appear here, so positioning their revelation as behind the existence of Desolation is daft in the extreme. Certainly teasing a “mystery of Desolation” around it is ridiculous.
In a way, this vapidity ironically justifies the approach. Moffat-era Doctor Who could give three page long previews of episodes in Doctor Who Magazine because his stories did a good job of having multiple ideas. You could spoil the first fifteen minutes of a story because there was a whole half hour doing completely different things—Kill the Moon is probably the best example here, with a gushing Doctor Who Magazine preview about spider horror on the moon followed by, well, we don’t have to relitigate that here.
Of course, not all Moffat era episodes were twisting multipremise spectaculars. Sometimes they really did just take a premise and explore it, and those got perfectly good reviews —Mummy on the Orient Express never really develops new premises past “there’s a mummy and it’s on the Orient Express, only in space,” but there are clear character arcs and reveals that hold it together, and so again, the preview didn’t “spoil” the episode in any sense of ruination. That’s very much not the case here. Describe this as “the Doctor and her companions navigate a hostile alien planet” and you’ve actually pretty much spoiled the episode except for the detail that the prize is the TARDIS. There’s simply not much more than the premise here. Chibnall’s reluctance to have it spoiled makes a vague sort of sense, at least assuming improving the episode to something that could survive having its premise revealed before you watched it was off the table.
Still, you can’t get to fifty minutes without event, or at least without scenes in which people say words and things happen, which turns out to be subtly but crucially different. So let’s look at those. The first big one, obviously, is the conversation between Ryan and Graham on the boat, a dramatic scene that pays off the tension between them set up in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. Except what is the tension within the scene? What do Ryan and Graham want from each other? To put it in drama 101 terms, what’s the conflict? In essence, it’s that Graham wants to have a conversation and Ryan doesn’t. This is, to put it mildly, not a great dramatic engine. It fundamentally positions one character as an impediment to having an interesting scene. There are countless interesting positions Ryan could take here. “You only knew her for a few years, I grew up with her.” “You shouldn’t have let her make that climb; I wish you had died instead.” “You’re not my granddad, you’re just the guy who makes fun of me for my disability.” All of these are interesting options that would open up the possibility of, you know, a dramatic scene with stakes and things that people want. Instead we get an extended scene of Ryan being truculent and avoiding having a dramatic confrontation. Sure, it’s a “believable” response for a teenager, but it’s shitty, inert, and boring drama.
And then, on the other side of some action scenes, we have the Boy’s Own science demonstration. This is tricky to judge as a middle aged fan, because it’s clearly aimed at being Educational For The Kids. Let’s leave aside, then, the actually wrong bits about the science here—that the garlic smell of acetylene is actually impurities from the most common industrial process producing it, and, more significantly, that what the Doctor concocts is essentially a fuel air bomb that would have suffocated all of them. I mean, sure, scientific accuracy is probably nice to have when doing science lessons for kids, but honestly, let’s leave it aside and once again look at this scene as a dramatic unit.
First of all, let’s note the inanity of it, with the final revelation—that acetylene burns—being in fact the only one of the three facts about acetylene that an average non-welder would be likely to conjure up on the spot. But more than that, let’s note the sheer, vapid sloppiness of the way that the set piece has to rely on a self-lighting cigar—an utterly, bafflingly arbitrary bit of “whatever” technology that requires being established in the transparently bland nothing of a line whereby the actual parts about cigars that are valued and respected are then one-upped with a “this is the best bit, they make them self-lighting.” And even there the best that Chibnall can actually manage to come up with is, “It takes half an Althusian lifetime to make just one of these. To make them, roll them, age them,” which is just an amazing bit of dialogue both in that the only thing Chibnall appears to actually be able to conjure up that might be a descriptor of a fine cigar is “aged” and, more significantly, for the rare opportunity to watch someone’s stuttering verbal improvisation make it into finished and transmitted dialogue—just look at that repetition of the verb “make.” And yes, this is tipping into a level of nit-picking that borders on critical sadism, but it’s such a hapless, inept way to flub something that it’s hard not to marvel. Like, could he really not even come up with a second verb? Harvest? Dry? Carefully build molecule by molecule with an Althusian Matter Compiler?
And that’s, in the end, the thing about this script, and about so many others in the Chibnall era. It feels like a first draft. Give this draft to Russell T Davies and you’d get, well, probably something about as good as 42, but look, that’s miles better that this is. Give it to Moffat and he’ll at least make sure a The Power of Three gets crafted in the edit. Heck, give this draft to a mostly checked out and working on other shows Russell T Davies and you’ll still get a Countrycide out of it. But left on his own, with no higher authority on the scripts, we see Chibnall’s vision, and it amounts to… nothing. Just… nothing. Script after script where the ideas simply are not honed to the point where they cohere, where they say anything, where they even function as basic drama. I’ve written about fifty-four years worth of Doctor Who successfully and found things to talk about in all of them, but this is legitimately the hardest one I’ve ever attempted to look at because it’s just an absolute void—ideas so coarsely and ineptly worked that they do not actually have the property of “aboutness” yet. I honestly have no idea how I’ll get through three seasons of it. But here, at least, is a map of what goes wrong. So now let’s trace the implications.
January 15, 2024 @ 6:05 am
False conflict in dialogue is something Chibnall uses a lot, which plays heavily into my impression of him as a guy who knows “how to write stories” in a theoretical sense, but has no personal feelings or ideas on the matter. He knows that you’re supposed to include conflict in your character interactions, because that’s an accepted fact, but his deployment of it makes zero sense in any context outside of “I am disinterestedly following the rules I read about how writing works”.
I’ve been watching Torchwood for the first time recently, and in the season 1 finale Owen disrespects Jack’s authority and tells him off, which leads to Jack getting really pissed and angrily telling him to leave Torchwood. I truly can’t imagine Jack giving a shit in the slightest about this – surely he would just laugh off Owen’s grandstanding as usual – but that just doesn’t matter to Chris – the characters have conflict because “conflict is good in writing”, rather than any reason that extends out of their characterizations.
I think it’s in the previous episode of DW that has Graham imply that he doesn’t actually believe that Ryan has dyspraxia, which is a pretty heavy way to characterize Graham, especially in his first episode! But AFAIK that doesn’t come up again either, does it? It’s just a line he threw in because “characters are arguing” – it paints Graham monstrously, but to Chibnall it clearly wasn’t intended to, and characters can say shocking awful things as long it’s part of Doing Conflict, which is Writing. (Though I guess “a dad says awful things he doesn’t believe for literally no reason when he’s mad” is, um, realistic. But surely not intentional.) And generically following the rules of writing is as high as Chris can imagine anyone ever reaching for, I think.
January 16, 2024 @ 10:51 pm
If he thought you always had to have conflict you’d think there’d be more conflict.
January 21, 2024 @ 10:39 am
“If he thought you always had to have conflict you’d think there’d be more conflict.”
Well, isn’t that the real mystery of Chris Chibnall? If he were simply a hack, then he could have made things so much easier for himself. Bring back the Daleks as the series’ Big Bad. Make one of the companions a gun-toting femme fatale in thigh-high leather boots, make another a cute robot. Give them some big operatic conflict that gets resolved in the tenth episode, when they realise that despite their differences they’re still “family.” Retain the stable of writers that Davies and Moffat had assembled, who could be relied upon to deliver six or seven above average stories per series. Hire established tv performers who have demonstrated the ability to chew the scenery as your protagonists. Give Ryan a disability that doesn’t hamper his ability to run around shooting baddies. I mean it would be hackneyed, but it would also be a perfectly adequate Sunday tea-time entertainment.
Instead, Chibnall imposes all these limitations on himself. They make everything so difficult. Why have four protagonists? Why introduce all four in the first episode? Why have your companions come from the same time and place, and have the same ethical and moral viewpoint? Why insist that all ten episodes are standalone? Why no returning villains? Why set 80% of the stories on Earth?
I am not saying it is impossible to make a good series within those limitations, but I do think it demands a higher level of skill from the writers, actors, directors and everyone else involved. Chibnall really needed a Jane Trantor type to say, “you’re not that good, Chris. Lets just keep it simple.”
January 21, 2024 @ 10:52 am
I think, Bernard, we answer many (but not all of your questions) by looking back to El’s Broadchurch article and realising that Chibnall isn’t turning out a hack science fiction author’s version of Doctor Who, but a hack prestige drama writer’s version of it which is then, as a second step, put through a hack science fiction filter.
So he wouldn’t have ever put in a sexy assassin in thighboots – that idea wouldn’t have arisen in stage 1 – but he would introduce a fam of people from diverse backgrounds in stage 1, and then brush away anything interesting which might come from that in stage 2.
January 21, 2024 @ 3:04 pm
I might say that there is a “journeyman” quality to Chibnall’s writing: he strikes me as someone who has practiced the craft by parts, studied hard, has many of the techniques down. But he isn’t a master of it. In particular, he is VERY lacking in the skillset of the big picture, of bringing all those techniques together to make a cohesive story. If you asked him to build you a chest of drawers, without someone else providing the design and directing the work, the scrollwork on the legs would be exquisite, but there would be seventeen of them, many not directed toward the floor. The dovetailing would be perfect, but the drawers wouldn’t fit into the carcase. The finish would be beautiful, but applied to the inside of the thing. (Been reading carpentry blogs recently. Sorry).
January 21, 2024 @ 6:25 pm
For me it comes back to the same drive as why he includes false conflict in dialogue (as opposed to real conflict): because he knows intellectually what’s concensus “good writing”. He knows that making the whole thing pulpy would be “cliche” and “not good”, and he knows that including diversity and topical issues is, apparently, “good”. But it’s all purely theoretical, and he has no idea why anyone thinks any of these things – and most importantly, he does not know that he doesn’t know, and has likely never needed to.
It sounds like I’m being really harsh on Chris as a person, but I’d actually say that kind of mental process is completely normal – typical, you might say – and probably very useful, socially speaking. It’s one that helps you get along with your coworkers and do your job reliably and predictably. It also does not tend to land you in an ambitious creative position, like running Doctor Who. The real story of the Chibnall era might not be that he’s a bad writer, but that they didn’t have (or didn’t THINK they had) anyone better they could’ve chosen instead.
January 21, 2024 @ 6:50 pm
Yeah, a worthwhile parallel could be find with Eric Saward, who was promoted to script editor on the strength of having written a pretty good story once, and then we got the era we got out of that.
The big difference being that Saward was not the apex of creative power in his era.
January 19, 2024 @ 12:17 pm
For Graham being Wrong About Dyspraxia to come up again, Ryan’s dyspraxia would need to come up again fairly often, and of course it doesn’t.
I strongly suspect Chibnall wanted to tick the “disability” diversity tickbox, but decided that a visible disability would cause writing and difficulties, so he gave Ryan an invisible disability and then ignored it most of the time.
I hate that the people accusing Chibnall of indulging in diversity purely for performative fauxgressive cool points were right, but it’s really hard to refute the point when stuff like that happens. Chibnall shows every sign of understanding that diversity is something which is wanted by the fanbase and is a good thing, but no understanding of why that is, or even having much passion for it, because if he really thought the representation of disabled characters was important, he wouldn’t have made Ryan’s dyspraxia so utterly disposable.
January 15, 2024 @ 6:32 am
I do wonder if that point on the secrecy of the show and sparsity of the previews in this era betrays a lack of confidence from the production team, as well as valuing secrecy and surprise for its own sake. After all Moffat and Russell T did plenty of their own highly concealed shock reveal storytelling where they heavily emphasised the secrecy of what they were doing.
But for episodes like Mummy on the Orient Express (where there is no secret of greater scope than the episode’s plot) there was no fear that heavily previewing the premise would detract from the pleasures of the episode. The production team could talk about the setting and premise (even the twist that the Orient Express is IN SPACE!), the Christie-ish atmosphere, the supporting cast in the basic confidence that this would entice people to watch. That knowing about it would make people excited to see all these elements in motion, that ‘The Orient Express IN SPACE’ was going to be even more fun to see than just hear about.
Whereas does the obsessive secrecy of the Chibnall era over even minor plots reveal a basic lack of confidence that anyone would care after hearing the elevator pitch? After all what does “The Doctor and her new friends are caught up in the universe’s most dangerous race across a deadly planet for the ultimate prize” substantially reveal that the limp official blurb does not? It sort of suggests to me some fear that the production’s got little going for it except a sense of mystery, and the more that’s given away, even in unimportant facts like ‘there’s a race in this episode’, the less people are going to tune in.
January 15, 2024 @ 8:23 am
Remember the trailer for series 11 that amounted to ‘there will be actors in it.’
January 15, 2024 @ 1:46 pm
I guess it might have seemed at the time like the series was following the familiar old pattern of episode 2 being the one where the companions get to see alien worlds for the first time, and then episode 3 is the one where they see the past. I can’t remember this episode doing much with that premise. The companions just seem really thick and gormless most of the time, like they haven’t got much clue where they are. Or maybe that’s Bradley Walsh’s schtick that set the tone.
January 15, 2024 @ 2:24 pm
The bit the really irritated me with this episode was near the end where they find a bit of graffiti that fills in all the remaining bits of exposition! I thought that was amazingly clunky, probably the prime example of Chibnall’s “tell not show” technique , although there are other candidates.
I did think at the time that the “Timeless Child” reference was probably just referring to the Doctor having insecurities about being lonely and adrift in time or something and was amused that people were clinging onto it as evidence of a story arc, and I still wonder if that was all it was but Chibnall then panicked and though he better trying a cobble together some kind of story arc out of it because people were expecting it.
January 15, 2024 @ 6:36 pm
Mh, not convinced. Looking at the lines again (praise be to Chakoteya), they seem almost over-the-top in flagging that these lines are Foreshadowing about an Important Secret.
REMNANTS: We see deeper, though, further back. The Timeless Child.
DOCTOR: What did you just say?
REMNANT: She doesn’t know.
DOCTOR: What are you talking about? What can you see?
REMNANT: We see what’s hidden even from yourself. The outcast, abandoned and alone.
(By the way, rather funny in hind-sight that random bio-weapons made of old clothes can apparently pierce through the mind-wipe when a big bad mythical type like Swarm, two seasons later, will be forced to conclude that “there is not a tiny corner of [the Doctor] that remembers”. Moffat and Davies have done much worse in the way of foreshadowing not quite matching the punchline, of course. But still: funny.)
January 15, 2024 @ 8:07 pm
Yes , you’re probably right . Pity, I liked that theory.
January 22, 2024 @ 7:23 am
I saw the official Doctor Who annual at Christmas. Presumably written under the auspices of the RTD2 team. It’s quite clever really, as it does acknowledge the the Timeless Child thing, but also implies it may not be totally reliable – saying that for some people, the Doctor’s origin in the abandoned immortal orphan, and for other people it starts when this bloke left Gallifrey with his granddaughter. He’s trying to have his cake and eat it. Bearing in mind the primary audience here is kid fans, it’s a positive way to handle things while also giving the new team some leeway. I thought it was quite gracious.
January 22, 2024 @ 10:41 am
It still startles me how many people are confused and surprised that RTD didn’t explicitly decanonize the Timeless Child. That so many people thought that RTD, the dude who totally could have erased the Zarbi and the Quarks, but instead brought back the Macra, would “obviously” say “No but” instead of “Yes and”.
January 16, 2024 @ 8:54 am
I think the speculation at the time was the opposite – that was a hasty ADR in as Chibnall was planning his next series after this ostentatiously arc-less one.
January 16, 2024 @ 7:20 pm
How sorely I miss the brief window of fan discussion immediately post-Ghost Monument, where I was insistent that “The Timeless Child” wasn’t set-up for a story arc because it was clearly such generic filler dialogue, and that Tim Shaw wouldn’t be back for the finale because he was such an boring non-entity that had served any purpose he ever could have.
January 21, 2024 @ 2:19 pm
For some reason at the time I was fairly sure it was going to be Rahul’s missing sister (taken by the Stenza and, I don’t know, taken out of time or something).
Then by the time of the series finale and Tim Shaw’s stasis technology being so central to whatever it was that story was trying to be about, it seemed like it was connecting something up…
January 16, 2024 @ 7:21 pm
How sorely I miss the brief window of fan discussion immediately post-Ghost Monument, where I was insistent that “The Timeless Child” wasn’t set-up for a story arc because it was clearly such generic filler dialogue, and that Tim Shaw wouldn’t be back for the finale because he was such an boring non-entity that had already served any purpose he ever could have.
January 16, 2024 @ 8:31 pm
“Who are the watchers? And do they mean the Doctor and his companions any harm?”
January 17, 2024 @ 12:40 am
“What is the secret of ‘Henrik’s’? And just who is Clive?” #thecurseofhenriks
January 17, 2024 @ 1:26 pm
Great review! Loved it! I might actually force myself to watch the other two seasons just so I can keep understanding these
January 30, 2024 @ 3:17 pm
Please don’t do this to yourself. It’s like getting through the pandemic without contracting COVID-19 and then purposefully infecting yourself with the coronavirus just to see what everyone is talking about.
January 18, 2024 @ 11:08 am
A combination of faded memory and lack of lived experience may make me regret asking, but it’s a genuine question. I’m sure I recall Ryan, who is clearly labelled as dyspraxic in the previous episode, outrunning or dodging some shooty-bang-bang-laser people. At the time it was a minor discordant note, or maybe slightly intriguing. Was that right? Nothing much came of it, but I remember wondering if was “important” or whether it was a variation on “Stormtroopers are terrible at aiming” tropes. Does dyspraxia affect fine motor skills? Not that it ever really mattered.
Art Malik’s character suddenly disappears without any sense that Doctor has put him in his place, or righted a wrong, or … anything. Last week she definitely did something with Tim Shaw. This seems the first case where she just shrugged and let the bad guy off the hook. Reader, it was not the last.
There was a bit of emotion in the TARDIS reveal, but not particularly earned. I never really felt that I understood the interior layout. Maybe it was the dim lighting or whatever – couldn’t visualise it, not until next season. I was watching in standard resolution, not HD, on a not particularly big or bright screen. Seemed that the external door was far, far too far removed from the console. It didn’t cohere in some way Classic and Revival interiors did have a sense of space because they had boundaries. Taking the walls away makes it look smaller somehow.
I like me a good biscuit, but why go the trouble of mentioning a custard cream dispenser and then pretty much forgetting it for the rest of the season? Or maybe they did and I was catatonic.
Feel free to correct my faulty memory or lack of understand of dyspraxia by the way.
January 19, 2024 @ 2:06 pm
My main thought about the new TARDIS – beyond the fact that, much like everything else in this era, I think a lot of the individual elements are good, but they don’t cohere in any meaningful way – is the phrase that came into my mind to describe the ring of pillars that move in time to the column. I refer to them as “Genuflecting crystal dongs”.
January 22, 2024 @ 6:37 am
The fact that the Whitaker TARDIS exists in this black void with a few flat walls dotted around the console always made it look like a set in a soundstage rather than an actual room. I’ve never been able to buy it as a location that people would actually live in.
January 22, 2024 @ 7:18 am
Yeah, somewhere to live in. Classic TARDIS sets and scripts often had or implied “Living Quarters”. Not that they were particularly exciting in narrative terms, but there was an acknowledgement they they existed. Having recently watched “Mind Robber” and “Time Meddler” you see that. But where did Ryan or Yaz or Graham or whatever go to sleep? (As a child I wondered occasionally why you rarely saw characters in a serial use the bathroom. More sophisticated me understands narrative conventions.) Anyway, it seems the the lack of boundary walls on the Whitaker TARDIS set acts to reduce a sense of grandeur rather than enhancing it.
January 22, 2024 @ 9:15 am
There is a bit of me that enjoys the overt theatricality of “a few walls in a black void,” but yeah.
I think it takes a longish time though for the show to be entirely explicit and settled on the matter of how the TARDIS interior is subdivided. Edge of Destruction seems to show a dormitory-style living quarters immediately off the console room, but nothing else. Planet of the Daleks has a pull-out bed off to the side of the console room itself. It’s not until the fourth Doctor period that they settle down on the idea of the TARDIS interior as an infinite rabbit-warren, and I think it’s only with that 4-5 crew that we ever actually see bedrooms. The new series hasn’t spent a lot of time outside the console room. Amy and Rory mention their bedroom, but we don’t see them. We have the two notable eleventh Doctor stories that tour the interior a bit, and Tennant has one scene in the wardrobe.
January 18, 2024 @ 5:15 pm
” Notably, this description consists entirely of questions. More to the point, the questions are extremely stupid.”
Oh, so it’s an EDA.
January 19, 2024 @ 7:10 am
I actually have dyspraxia so i might be able to help? Dyspraxia has a wide range of symptoms, so it would be impossible to depict them all, but this era of Doctor Who is ultimately pretty hopeless with illustrating what the disorder is. The most common traits are problems with fine and gross motor skills, reaction speeds, spatial awareness, organisational skills, time management and concentration.
It would be very, very unusual for someone to be diagnosed with dyspraxia and not have difficulties with their fine and gross motor skills. Ryan does have those difficulties, as we could see with his attempts at riding a bike in the first episode, and his fear of climbing the ladder.
Him suddenly being a crack shot with a gun he’s just picked up and has never used before, just because he’s played computer games, is like someone with one leg spontaneously re-growing a new one and then immediately outpacing Usain Bolt because they’ve played Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games on the Wii.
January 19, 2024 @ 8:14 am
Thanks Aaron.
Speaking as someone who hates ladders, took longer than my peers to learn to ride a bike, and not noted for exceptional motor skills, spatial awareness or time management, that’s certainly food for thought if nothing else. Mind you, I’ve managed for 60 years and still going. There are surely some people worse off than I am.
I’ll give Chibnall credit for trying to raise awareness of things like that. Knowing how other people might think, act, and perceive the world, or discovering that one is not alone in one’s (dis)ability, is a fantastic goal and admirable, so full marks to Mr. C. The execution, less so. Given Doctor Who’s primary remit is to entertain, there’s obviously a ceiling on what could ever be accomplished with disability awareness. But for whatever reason (Writers Room, Series Bible, poor communications) it wasn’t handled with internal logic or a clear understanding of the condition.
Speaking of which, two things come to mind for the present day and might be far-off additions for the Gatwa Eruditorum
RTD2, Davros, Ruth Madeley and “disability-as-evil” tropes
The ability of TV to still galvanize public debate. Will the ITV1 drama on the Horizon scandal (Mr. Bates vs the Post Office) prove to be an outlier, or will TV regain its ability to get people talking? I knew the basics of the scandal if not the details, only vaguely aware of the existence of the currently-running (Jan 2024) enquiry. Did ITV1 just get lucky in the choice of subject and release timing?
I was going to come back from the future to edit this response, but that darned Mr. Blinovitch and his Limitation Effect …
January 19, 2024 @ 10:41 pm
I’m not sure what you’re saying and the Post Office scandal in relation to this blog, but I don’t think they got lucky with the timing. I just think it’s good they did it. It could have been done at any time in the last 20 years and had a positive impact similar to that which it has.
January 20, 2024 @ 12:20 pm
It wasn’t the most coherent thing I’ve ever said, and the formatting screwed up a bit.
I was wondering, when El gets round to a “Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea” entry going into the Gatwa ere, it might be interesting to look at whether drama-documentaries and the like had a meaningful place in the TV landscape in 2023. Is the Mr. Bates thing a last attempt at linear broadcast TV to be meaningful, will this set a trend for the future? But now I’m just speculating.
January 19, 2024 @ 7:33 pm
I have to thank you, your comment educated me more about Dyspraxia than any Chibnall era episode I watched.
January 19, 2024 @ 7:58 pm
For what it’s worth i think Chibnall’s heart was in the right place. The issue was the inconsistency throughout Ryan’s time on the programme. It’s like Ryan’s dyspraxia only occurs in specific scenes that are about Ryan having dyspraxia and then disappear the rest of the time because those scenes are about something else unrelated. The disorder was reduced to being a thing that is sometimes an inconvenience for Ryan but mostly has no real impact on his life.
This isn’t a problem that is specific to this particular character aspect though. It happens to all of the companions and the Thirteenth Doctor with their motivations and character traits. They turn into completely different people from scene to scene. There’s criticisms to be made of characters like Tegan, Nyssa and Adric but at least they were coherent and consistent. We knew who they were. We knew no more about Ryan as a person after he left than we did in his very first appearance.
January 19, 2024 @ 8:05 pm
It’s a very “can’t see the forest for the trees” writing approach, isn’t it? Individual scenes are devised and once they’ve hit the specific thing they need to do, that’s good enough, but there’s not enough big-picture thinking to really tie things together.
January 21, 2024 @ 10:22 am
Isn’t that precisely the show-runner’s job? In which case, giving Chibnall any benefit of the doubt is sorely misplaced.
This episode was the moment I gave up on the Whittaker era. I carried on watching but haven’t re-watched any of it.
In fact, having just binged all of Nu Who with my wife (a new convert to Doctor Who) we made the joint decision to skip Whittaker after Capaldi and go straight to the RTD2 specials. Such a shame the first female Doctor was so badly served.
January 21, 2024 @ 10:42 am
The showrunner’s job covers massive amounts of ground – I think to a point where it’s difficult to sustain and so not surprising when people struggle with it. (Really, it’s a shock the batting average has been this good.) There’d be something to be said for splitting it into something like the producer/script editor distinction of the classic show.
That said… yeah, that was exactly my point, big picture stuff is unambiguously something which falls under the showrunner’s list of basic duties and Chibnall seems to have been very bad at it.
January 21, 2024 @ 10:27 am
Isn’t that precisely the show runner’s job?
January 24, 2024 @ 8:47 am
I don’t care where Chibnall’s heart was- I care that he produced an era of television that gave a character a disability and then proceeded to treat it as a joke and an excuse on the rare occasions he could actually be bothered to include it in the show.
If the Chibnall era had come out when I was a dyspraxic little kid, I wouldn’t have felt represented or seen – I’d have felt absolutely humiliated.
January 19, 2024 @ 2:18 pm
I always got the vibe watching these years of the show, and reading your comments on it, that this would be the most difficult Eruditorum of all, because so many of the stories are so vapid. I wonder if it would be interesting to understand Chibnall as a kind of warped, tragic return of Ian Levine, with more direct power over what Doctor Who is actually becoming than he could ever have exercised through his own role with the show in the 1980s.
Specifically, I’m thinking of how much both Levine and Chibnall care about the specific facts of the Doctor Who universe and Doctor Who’s narratives, and how it seems impossible that anyone could care about aspects of the narrative other than its specific facts. Levine thought it mattered more that a random spaceship whose name is mentioned once in a story not be the same as a random spaceship whose name was mentioned once in a story 15 years before. Chibnall thought the audience would genuinely care more about what was the battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos more than we would the reconciliation between Ryan and his stepdad Graham. I think it’s because Chibnall and Levine both cared about those facts as the parts of the show that excited them more than anything else. But Chibnall wasn’t writing an encyclopedia of Doctor Who’s universe and continuity; he was writing Doctor Who.
January 19, 2024 @ 10:49 pm
Oh that is a great way to put it. He comes off like he’s writing for the concordance. Lots and lots of facts and details that will make good trivia questions, but not much in the way of narrative.
It makes me reflect on the fact that the first several generations of fandom effectively didn’t have access to the primary sources – almost everything was lost, and what was still around was at the mercy of reruns. For those generations of fans, the target novelizations, the concordances, the trivia books WERE the show, and fitting a pattern that could be represented in the structure of a spreadsheet really substituted for the structure of a cohesive narrative.
January 20, 2024 @ 6:18 pm
“the ludicrous overvaluation of surprise over other aesthetic reactions”
In this single regard, at least, I feel like Chibnall is in synch with the zeitgeist. I feel like in the last few years, the anti-spoiler stance has gotten more popular and more extreme. To quote an example that really made an impression on me: I saw a post about the Smith era that advised new viewers to close their eyes when the title of the episode is shown on-screen because the titles sometimes contain spoilers, like “Time of the Angels”. You know, the titles that were purposefully put there by the creators of the show…
(I also saw someone advising people not to look too closely at a family tree that’s clearly shown on-screen, in close-up, in one episode of “Dark” because, apparently, it spoils too much.)
“ideas so coarsely and ineptly worked that they do not actually have the property of “aboutness” yet”
Well put, and this is the most damning thing about the Chibnall era for me. Chibnall’s scripts fail at such a basic level that it’s hard to believe they came from a seasoned TV professional. He got paid for this shit? I would be embarassed to write something this bad for free.
January 24, 2024 @ 6:09 am
My overriding memory of this one, other than a nice shot of the TARDIS at the end, is “don’t touch the water – it’s deadly” and a close up of… water. And then nobody ever mentions it again, nor does it ever become a danger to any character.
January 24, 2024 @ 6:19 am
“Tell not show” becomes “Tell me one thing and show another to no good purpose”.
February 28, 2024 @ 3:59 am
Blimey. It shows the little impact this episode made on me that I have no recollection whatsoever that the Stenza were referenced in this episode. Normally that’s the sort of detail I really love about the show.