Elizabeth Sandifer

It’s April 17th, 2022. Harry Styles is at number one with “As It Was.” Jack Harlow, Dave, and Cat Burns also chart. The biggest news since Eve of the Daleks is Russia invading Ukraine. The Gray report on Boris Johnson’s COVID parties emerges, and Boris Johnson is subsequently fined for his breaking of the law. Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, Microsoft buys Activision, and the state of Florida outlaws telling children gay people exist.

Somewhere in there I download and watch this. I don’t really remember that, though. What I remember is a few weeks earlier, on April 2nd, when the trailer drops. I’m in Connecticut again, called in to take care of my father while my mother and sister go to a family wedding. It was over a decade on from his stroke now, and he was just frail and couldn’t safely be alone that long. Penn and I loaded our computers into the back of the cars—Wacom tablet and all for Penn—and we unpacked in the old office where I used to log onto rec.arts.doctorwho via the VAX and spent a few days just working there and taking care of him. I wrote a bunch of the Big Numbers chapter of Last War in Albion, and Penn drew issue 3 of Britain a Prophecy—the scene with Queen Elizabeth.

I watched The Sea Devils itself in that house, on tapes he made off PBS. I can’t remember how that tape worked. I think The Sea Devils was the thing labeled on it, and then there were probably two or three unlabeled bonus features—something like the poorly tracked version of The Time Warrior, or one of the Peter Cushing movies, or part four and only part four of The Caves of Androzani. But it could have been the other way around. I don’t know. The room where I watched them has long since been gut renovated, turned into the apartment where I spent some time living with my wife while writing the chunk of the blog from late Tom Baker into the Wilderness Years. It was where I lived when the shooting happened. Penn stayed in that apartment once too, dogsitting for me with the abusive ex-boyfriend he these days describes as the transmasc equivalent of joining the army to get the girl beaten out of you.

It’s wonderful to spend time with my dad. I cook for him—I remember chicken parmesan and steak au poivre. We watch a movie every night—CODA, But I’m a Cheerleader, Knives Out, and Annihilation, in his ranking. We leave and vow that we should just do it again some time, to give my mother a break from the constant caregiving, because it’s just so nice to see him.

It turns out to be the last time I do.

Legend of the Sea Devils, meanwhile, turns out to be another iteration of the Chibnall era’s paranoid recreation of the Nathan-Turner era—an episode of television that can, rather astonishingly, be described as Warriors of the Deep done wrong.…

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It’s January 1^st, 2022. Ed Sheeran and Elton John are at number one with “Merry Christmas.” Wham, Mariah Carey, the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, and a variety of other Christmas classics also chart. (The one mercy of the Chibnall era’s abandonment of the Christmas Special turns out to be that at no point have I had to talk about Ladbaby.)  In news, large amounts of stuff in the UK has shut down again because of the massive spike in COVID due to the Omicron variant. The Guardian publishes a photo of Boris Johnson having a wine party during lockdown. Big Ben is reopened, the James Webb space telescope launches, and the first Starbucks in the US is unionized in Buffalo, New York.

I’m at home, Christmas plans having gone the way of Thanksgiving in the face of Omicron. We have Alex and Meredith over for a Boxing Day dinner to use all the food we bought for a more elaborate option. Somewhere in this general space we also switch to a days schedule for the first time in ages as my wife gets a major promotion at work. And then, to ring in the new year, this.

Which as fine, really. The thing about Eve of the Daleks is that it’s not actually that bad. Indeed, it’s pretty comfortably the best Chibnall-penned story of his era. This success arises in part out. of circumstances that have proven to be reliably good for Doctor Who in the past, namely having to bang something together quickly and with neither time nor money. The story goes that this was written in two weeks after some previous script fell through. It was shot something like six months ahead of broadcast, leaving little time for VFX. They blatantly have nothing save for a warehouse, two Daleks, and five actors. And they’re still shooting under COVID restrictions. All of which helpfully forces Chibnall to abandon his doomed epic instincts and do a small scale story without grander stakes beyond having Daleks in it. Add in a premise that forces structure onto the episode and you have…

Well, there’s the problem. See, when I sat down to watch this, a few minutes in I found myself grabbing my laptop and banging out a quick paragraph, because I had an idea I didn’t want to forget:

Aisling Bea manages the remarkable feat of making scenes funny despite a complete lack of actual funny bits. It’s quietly one of the most impressive feats of comedy I’ve ever seen. Like, any comedian can make a good joke funny. I’ve seen plenty who can make bad jokes funny. But there is perhaps no purer demonstration of the art of comedic acting than making the complete absence of jokes funny. Not even Stewart Lee goes that far.

It wasn’t until I opened the computer back up the next day to start writing the essay proper that I realized that this was supposed to be the “Chibnall gets one right” essay, and that it really had no real use for a paragraph written in what an editor recently and charmingly called my “usual acerbic” style.…

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The week of The Vanquishers brought a unique blend of sounds and events to the airwaves and headlines. As audiences eagerly tuned in to witness the climactic conclusion of Doctor Who’s Flux arc, the charts resonated with an eclectic mix of musical offerings. The rhythmic beats of ‘Levitating’ by Dua Lipa and the catchy melodies of ‘Stay’ by The Kid LAROI and Justin Bieber dominated the pop charts, captivating listeners with their infectious energy. Meanwhile, the alternative rock scene saw the haunting melodies of ‘Heat Waves’ by Glass Animals captivate the hearts of music enthusiasts. In the realm of news, global conversations were sparked by breakthroughs in renewable energy as solar power reached a record-breaking milestone, illuminating the path towards a sustainable future. Simultaneously, the cultural landscape saw vibrant discussions on the impact of diverse representation in media, with thought-provoking films and television series driving conversations on inclusivity and social progress.

Against this backdrop, The Vanquishers premiered, inviting audiences to explore the intricacies of time and space while reflecting on the world they inhabited. When diving into the penultimate episode of a Doctor Who series, one typically expects a crescendo of narrative threads, a melding of character arcs, and a coherence that suggests the writers have been plotting a masterstroke from the outset. The Vanquishers, however, delivers a cacophony of convoluted storylines and rushed conclusions that feels more like a chaotic patchwork than a climactic resolution. Chibnall’s ambition to weave an intricate tapestry of storylines is evident, but the execution falters significantly. The multiple Doctors are a gimmick that overshadows rather than enhances the narrative, creating an experience akin to sketching a landscape while surfing a tsunami: it conveys a profound sense of hopelessness, futility, and the near-impossibility of achieving any meaning.

Central to this bleak meditation is the Doctor herself, whose quest for agency and resolution amidst the chaotic Flux is rendered futile by the very mechanisms of time and space that mock her efforts. Each victory is pyrrhic, each moment of hope ephemeral against the backdrop of a multiverse shaped by entropy and cosmic indifference, where endings are foregone conclusions and triumphs are mere illusions of progress. The return of fan-favorite characters, including Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and the Daleks emphasizes the toll of witnessing countless iterations of history and the futility of attempting to impose order or meaning. As the Doctor navigates the swirling currents of the Flux Jack disrupts conventional plans and expectations, while the Daleks capture the Time Lord characters and subject them to a continuous cycle of regeneration and re-capture, creating a nightmarish scenario where these characters repeatedly experience the trauma and pain of regeneration without the release of death.

The Daleks’ plan raises philosophical questions about the nature of mortality and immortality. The Daleks deny the Time Lords the ability to maintain a stable identity or sense of self. Their insidious influence extends beyond mere physical threats, penetrating the temporal fabric itself. Mortality, which is fundamentally tied to the progression of time from past to future, becomes murky.…

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It’s November 28^th, 2021. Adele remains at number one, where she’s joined by two new Adele tracks, along with the Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift from last week. For variety, D-Block Europe featuring Central Cee sneaks in at 8^th. It’ll be back out of the top ten next week though. Don’t worry.

In news, a boat of thirty migrants capsizes in the English Channel, killing twenty-eight. The newly designated Omicron variant of COVID-19 causes Johnson to reimpose restrictions, with masks required on public transport and in shops again. In the US, it’s Thanksgiving weekend. We have Christine over for our first proper holiday together, and I do a hopelessly elaborate multi-course menu over the course of the day that leaves me gloriously dead on my feet by the end.

And on television, Survivors of the Flux, which notably contains two Vs in its title. In this regard it’s similar to Everything Everywhere All at Once, which came out four months later. There are other similarities, of course, though it’s easy to fall into the familiar fandom trap of declaring that any science fiction that engages in any sort of genre hopping or dramatic context shifts is aping Doctor Who. Indeed, one could readily argue that Everything Everywhere All at Once, which uses the conceit of a multiverse to endlessly iterate upon the same setting and characters, is in fact the precise conceptual inverse of Doctor Who, which would be better described as “everything everywhere in well-differentiated sequence.” Still, there’s something to the comparison—they’re both sci-fi stories operating in a comedy drama register fueled by an ability to take ostentatiously big swings like throwing in a giant talking dog or giving people hot dog fingers. And, obviously, the Vs.

The big difference is simply that Everything Everything All at Once was a massively successful film that romped to a Best Picture win while Flux was, as I believe I may have mentioned at some prior point, unwatchable garbage. Although, of course, those two things are in no way mutually exclusive—just look at Green Book. What’s more notable to say is that Everything Everywhere All at Once was a massively likeable film. Indeed, this was largely key to its success—it was a proper word of mouth hit, emerging from indie powerhouse studio A24 with a slow three week rollout from an initial ten screens up to thirty-eight and finally into wide release, where it sat in the middle of the box office pack for months without ever pulling more than $6m in a single week.

And no wonder. The film is a delight. I already mentioned the hot dog fingers section, but it’s worth stressing just how side-splittingly funny the sequence is—a proper “struggle to breathe from laughing so hard” moment. Or, really, a succession of them. We get a piss joke, Michelle Yeoh offering an absolutely top notch moment of physical comedy as she flaps her hands ineffectually at her daughter, the basic visual gag of the actual hot dog fingers, the line delivery of “she appears to be in a universe where everyone has… hot dogs instead of fingers,” the arrival of Jamie Lee Curtis with manicured hot dog fingers, a 2001: A Space Odyssey parody, and then the visual of the fingers spurting ketchup and mustard all in about ninety seconds of screen time.…

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It’s November 21^st, 2021. Adele and Ed Sheeran remain, but they’re joined this week by Taylor Swift’s ten minute expansion of “All Too Well” along with Sam Fender and Switchotr featuring A1 and J1. In news, Russia nearly fucks up the International Space Station by blowing up a satellite, the UK government ditches large swaths of its high speed rail plans in the north, and the US government passes the Build Back Better Act, a massive post-pandemic spending bill. Alex Jones is found liable for defamation against the parents of Sandy Hook children, while Kyle Rittenhouse is found not liable for murdering people in Wisconsin. Two days later, as this airs, another right-wing terrorist drives an SUV through a Christmas parade in Wisconsin, killing six.

On television, meanwhile, Village of the Angels, which, as the saying goes, if I had a nickel for every time in 2021 the BBC aired a program about Doctor Who and psychic messages sent across time via analog media I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. The other time came back in May, when BBC Four aired Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes. This is a strange film—a hybrid of an older short film by director Caroline Catz (who portrays Derbyshire) that has been expanded with a swath of talking heads footage (David Vorhaus, Peter Zinovieff, Madelon Hooykaas, and, most notably for Doctor Who nerds, Brian Hodgson) and a separate thread tracing Throbbing Gristle alumn Cosey Fanni Tutti’s creation of the film’s soundtrack via manipulation of the eponymous legendary tapes—a collection of 267 found in Derbyshire’s attic following her death in 2001 and subsequently housed at the John Ryland library in Manchester. The result is strange, surreal, and ghostlike, which is to say utterly appropriate for a study of Derbyshire.

Catz’s Derbyshire is a sort of frustrated visionary, seeking only, as she explains in her job interview for the Radiophonic Workshop, to “create sounds that have never existed in the world before.” Which, of course, she did, and spectacularly, most obviously with Doctor Who theme, which the film devotes a sizeable chunk of time to.  It starts from Ron Grainer’s scant account of the tune—the film depicts it as a hastily scribbled score and a set of adjectives like “wind bubbles” and directions that it should sound “familiar but different,” and be comparable to the well-funded twenty piece French ensemble Les Structures Sonores. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, to be clear, is a bunch of low paid weirdos in a basement with a bunch of aging radio equipment. Derbyshire volunteers for this plainly nightmarish job, and, of course, absolutely crushes it.

But what the film does a remarkable job of highlighting is the scale of how she accomplished this, creating individual pieces of tape for each of the notes she wants to use, at times calculating both the setting for her oscillator to produce the note she wants and the amount of tape needed for the duration.…

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It’s November 14th, 2021. Adele ain’t going anywhere on the charts. Neither is Ed Sheeran, but there’s also CKay, Glass Animals, and Arrdee. In news, Britney Spears is released from her conservatorship, a man detonates an IED outside the Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and Dominion Voting Systems sues Fox News for defamation around Donald Trump’s attempted coup.

On television, meanwhile, we have “Once, Upon Time,” an episode Chibnall’s co-executive producer Matt Strevens hyped to Doctor Who Magazine as “very ambitious” saying that “it credits the audience with sophistication and intelligence” whilst comparing it to the output of noted indie film studio A24. No, sorry, I’m kidding, he compares it to Marvel. That’s his actual example of ambitious storytelling—not even the competently upper middle brow stylings of A24, but the fucking Marvel Cinematic Universe. That’s intelligence and sophistication now—cynical IP farms that operate on the premise that everyone is basically just a fifteen year old boy.

Strevens was likely talking about WandaVision, the first show in this particular iteration of the “MCU on television” concept following Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on generic broadcast television and the Defenders suite on Netflix, both of which were memory-holed in favor of creating headliner content for Disney+, a streaming service we’ll have plenty of time to discuss later in life. That show opened with a trio of episodes dropped over two weeks that presented events in the form of cracked mirror historical sitcoms, starting with a 1950s I Love Lucy pastiche (complete with live studio audience) and moving up through the 1970s before finally revealing its proper conceit. This isn’t that far from “Once, Upon Time,” which sees Whittaker, Gill, and Bishop playing out an adventure that is eventually revealed to have really happened to the Jo Martin Doctor. That flutter of formalist play is neither especially ambitious nor anything like the norm for Marvel, but that’s neither here nor there, and while mocking Strevens for this is both easy and fun, it’s not especially revealing.

The more obvious point of comparison between Doctor Who and Marvel is Loki, which aired its first season just a few months prior to Flux. It’s not entirely fair to say that Loki is “Marvel tries to do Doctor Who,” but the inaccuracy is a matter of degree as opposed to a critique of the underlying association. Certainly Loki is Marvel doing a story about time travel with a mercurial lead who’s played by a British guy who can accurately be described as both “hot” and “a weird little guy.” Which, obviously, Doctor Who isn’t doing that last one in this period, but the point stands. Production on the first season was even disrupted by the pandemic, though Loki was filming in Atlanta under appreciably looser restrictions than a BBC production.

It will of course surprise nobody that Loki is appreciably better than Chibnall-era Doctor Who. It is made by people who can broadly be described as “knowing what they’re doing,” and so possesses things like character arcs and storylines that can accurately be described as being “about” things.…

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It’s November 7th, 2021. Adele is at number one with “Easy On Me.” Ed Sheeran, Ed Sheeran, and Ed Sheeran also chart. In news, a crowd crush at a Travis Scott concert killed ten, the House of Representatives passes an infrastructure bill designed largely to kill off more progressive bills from passing, and Owen Paterson resigns from Parliament after a report finding that he broke lobbying rules, although not before the Tories consider simply abandoning lobbying rules instead. Also, the phenomenally named Nimblewill Nomad becomes the oldest person to hike the Appalachian Trail.

I probably do some stuff too before grudgingly settling in to watch War of the Sontarans. But you know who it’s really interesting to imagine watching this? Russell T Davies. Really, it’s less this—you assume that, with Power of the Doctor in the can for several weeks, he’d been given pre-air copies of these episodes. You never know though—maybe Chibnall was just that spoilerphobic. By this point, though, Davies was already at work, dreaming of Meeps and Goblins. No, what’s interesting to imagine is Davies sitting down and watching Series 11 and 12 as a fan with no more idea than the rest of us that he’s the next showrunner.

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Davies—especially given that, despite calling it a Pop Between Realities post for the Capaldi era when I wrote it in 2015, I declined to actually run the essay I wrote on Cucumber/Banana/Tofu during the Capaldi Eruditorum, deeming it a bit too much of a review. But it’s notable that when the Chibnall era debuted that triptych of shows in 2015 and the three-episode A Very English Scandal earlier in 2018 were the only significant pieces of television writing Davies had done since the end of Torchwood.

The explanation for this is simple. In 2011, right in the midst of Miracle Day airing, his husband Andrew Smith was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer and given less than a year to live. Davies put all of his television work on hold and returned to Manchester to care for him. Cucumber was largely written—it had been developed as a BBC/Showtime co-production and was in the process of casting when Smith got sick and Davies pulled the plug. Piers Wegner got him to bring it to Channel 4, and it shot in Manchester.

At the end of September 2018, just over six years after his year to live, Smith passed. By this time Davies had already started his way back towards regular work—he’d made A Very English Scandal, and his next project, Years and Years, was on the brink of starting shooting. But before that, just over a week after Smith’s death, came The Woman Who Fell to Earth.

As I said, it’s worth imagining Davies watching these episodes. It’s implausible to imagine he didn’t recognize that Chibnall was fucking it up. This is a man who obsesses over how sets for people’s houses should have crap sitting on the staircases to look more lived in.…

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It’s October 31st, 2021. Adele is at number one with “Easy on Me.” Ed Sheeran, Elton John and Dua Lipa, Coldplay and BTS, and Lil Nas X also chart. In news, well, there’s ten fucking months of it. Failed coup in the US, successful one in Myanmar, the Ever Given running aground, Discovery acquiring Warner Brothers, Netanyahu briefly losing power in Israel, wildfires, heat waves, winter storms. The usual.

The real story, at least in terms of the qualia of being alive, is the slow lurching of the world towards approximated normality. COVID, of course, never goes away. It’s just a new illness we live with and that kills and disables people in large and horrifying quantities forever. But vaccination picks up speed and things start to reopen. Penn, Anna, and I take a trip to Chicago in September to go to nice restaurants for the first time in over a year. As is by now usual, my wife declines to join us. On the day that we’re heading home, my Twitter lights up with the news that Russell T Davies is returning to Doctor Who. I subsequently spend every rest stop along the twelve hour drive dealing with what is, effectively, being unexpectedly called into work.

One of the first decisions that I make based on the knowledge is that I’m going to write a Whittaker era Eruditorum. This had been largely up in the air—my stated position was that I’d only do it if some subsequent era made me want to write about the show in depth again. But the return of Davies was if nothing else sure to be interesting, and so I decided I’d do it.

I forget who watches this one with me. I think it might have been just Penn. (I eventually, writing these essays, just stopped telling him I was going to watch things so he’d stop doing this to himself.) Anticipating the fact that by this point in Eruditorum I would be struggling to find things to say, I only offered a capsule review on Patreon. I forget the exact text, and bothering to find it would probably take a solid 10-15% of the amount of time I spent on it in the first place, but the basic structure was that I described this as the “best Chibnall episode ever” because all it had to do was write checks that other episodes would fail to cash.

Which is to say that at this point, you just feel bad for the poor show. If The Timeless Children was Chris Chibnall being haunted by the vengeful spirits of Pip and Jane, here we see him pulling the same feat as John Nathan-Turner as he dragged Trial of a Time Lord through production despite the dramatic flouncing of the script editor, death of the writer mid-finale, and the fact that the show had literally just been cancelled. In both cases the result is a sort of heroic triumph of getting extremely bad television to air on BBC One and get coverage in mainstream newspapers.…

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It’s January 1st, 2021. Wham is at number one with “Last Christmas.” Mariah Carey, Band Aid, Elton John, and the Pogues featuring Kirsty Maccoll also chart. In news… well, there’s been a bit. Obviously we’ve already talked about the pandemic. But we haven’t talked about the 350,000 confirmed COVID deaths in the US, or the 72,000 in the UK—a full 1% of the population in each country. Nor have we talked about the appalling response in each country, from bleach injections to Eat Out to Help Out. There’s Keir Starmer becoming leader of the Labour Party. There’s Ruth Bader Ginsberg dying and being replaced by Amy Comey Barrett. There’s the Arecibo Telescope collapsing.

And then, of course, there’s the election. The agonizingly slow motion battle between the ongoing collapse into fascism under Trump and the bland inadequacy of centrist liberalism. With passport issuance fucked by the pandemic, the situation is alarming enough that our family decides to become gun owners. Ultimately the not as evil guys win, and it feels like more relief than it should. I remember when the last couple of states were properly called—it was an unseasonably warm day for November, and I was downtown on the Ithaca Commons, which felt effervescent in a way it hadn’t all pandemic. But, of course, that still rolled into the unsettling two month period of Trump’s attempted coup. By the new year it was largely clear that Biden would successfully take office, but the uncertainty remained, hanging over everything, as would become especially clear just five days after this aired.

Mostly, life lumbered on. We decided to officially adopt Christine. I finally dusted off Last War in Albion and tore through writing the rest of Volume 2. Vaccines came out; I think by New Year’s my wife, who was in the first wave as a nurse, had her first dose but not her second. To the extent that there was an end—and that’s a complicated notion to be sure—it was in sight.

And then there was Doctor Who. Much like the music charts, Revolution of the Daleks felt out of time. It’s not just the absurd return to 80s-style naming, turning to the title that literally everyone had thought of in spite of the complete lack of actual revolution in the story. (To be fair, previous stories contained at best dubious quantities of resurrection, revelation, or remembrance.) Nor is it the presence of a Theresa May stand-in a year and a half after Boris Johnson took office—a fact that’s even more puzzling when you consider that this was shot in November 2019, four months after May’s resignation. No, at the end of the day it’s more fundamental than that—the fact that this is picking up on a nearly year-old cliffhanger in which the year in question was 2020.

Three years on it seems even more dated, what with both actors involved in its puzzling decision to feature two separate returning characters named Jack becoming uncastable over the course of the next year.…

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