Elizabeth Sandifer

I am reminded of the way in which late-era Gatiss stories landed with a sense of pleasurable relief. Not in the high stakes way of Rosa or The Woman Who Fell to Earth where being crap would have had disastrous consequences, but in the way that you’re relieved when you brace yourself for pain that never comes. “Attack of the giant spiders written by Chris Chibnall” is as far from a straightforwardly promising premise as it is possible to get. And yet this is surprisingly good. It’s not a classic in the all-time best sense, but in the well-worn and vintage sense; it’s Doctor Who doing what Doctor Who does, and doing it well.

It’s fair to ask why. If you rifle through the back catalog for an obvious analogue, after all, the closest thing you get is probably The Lazarus Experiment, which is an outright failure of an episode. They’re both “return to Earth” episodes in which the Doctor finds a non-alien threat around the family life of one of someone who goes from being a temporary companion to a permanent fixture. Neither offers a particularly compelling premise or a searing sense of ambition. Indeed, there’s not necessarily an obvious explanation for why Arachnids in the UK is roughly The Faceless Ones tier while The Lazarus Experiment is closer to The Android Invasion.

Instead it’s a profusion of details. One thing the Chibnall era is rapidly establishing as a strength is its ability to structure the process of the Doctor figuring things out over the course of an episode. Where Moffat drew on his sitcom background to build ostentatious narrative contraptions that snapped together with a catharsis of (sometimes spurious) cleverness, Chibnall is drawing on his time writing various flavors procedurals, whether Law and Order UK, Broadchurch, or, in its own way, Torchwood to make a show that is about the Doctor encountering a situation and working out what it is and what to do with it. If Arachnids in the UK feels classic, it’s not in the “attack of the common phobia” sense, but in the sense of going back a mode of thinking about plot and setting that was consciously discarded in one sense when Innes Lloyd came to favor the base under siege as a narrative structure and in another when Russell T Davies reworked the show as a post-Buffy character drama.

But Chibnall isn’t rolling back the years so much as he’s working out how to do procedural Doctor Who in 2018 and in fifty-minute containers. There’s deftness to the way he splits the party to give Graham and Yaz character beats while weaving the establishment of the mystery across all three strands, then calmly reassembles it once the mystery is in place and it’s time to start investigating it. And he continues in this vein, breaking off Graham and Ryan to give them a big scene and establish the queen spider while the Doctor, Yaz, and Najia go solve the how and why of it, but then bringing everyone back together for the denouement.…

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I’m joined this week by the legendary Kate Orman (along with two cute but really annoying dogs and an intermittent drilling sound that crash the party, though both mercifully say in the background) to talk about Rosa. 

Check it out here.…

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A strange case where the episode itself matters less than the standards you decide to apply to it. What, exactly, do we want out of “Doctor Who meets Rosa Parks”? What is this supposed to do? A lot of us, myself included, reacted with a measure of wariness to, really, the whole affair. There are a lot of very obvious ways to do this wrong, and very little sense of how you’d do it right. The news that it’s by Malorie Blackman was comforting, but the fact that Chibnall saw fit to rewrite a black woman on Rosa Parks was ominous, and Blackman’s absence from the publicity and relative silence about the episode on Twitter seemed a bad omen.

In light of that, the easiest emotion to feel about the episode itself is relief. This is tightly constructed and coherent in ways previous episodes haven’t been. The character work is appreciably more lively. As a technical object, it’s vastly improved over both of the episodes before it. And despite a few clumsy moments, most obviously the bathos of the “they even named an asteroid after her” sequence, this is mostly considerably more subtle and intelligent than one might have feared. In an episode where the “don’t screw it up” stakes are high and the bar for doing so even higher, the Chibnall era has once again acquitted itself.

None of this, however, answers the question of what we want out of this. The nature of Jodie Whittaker’s casting means that the Chibnall era is essentially unable to even pretend to be apolitical, but this is the first time it’s really stepped up and owned that role. And yet as a framework for talking about race in Doctor Who, Rosa Parks is profoundly limited and, in its own way, lazy. The racism is displaced onto a foreign country, the historical figure is easy to remain hagiographic about, and the targets are soft as can be. In three weeks time we get Doctor Who doing the partition of India, a concept whose politics are equally overt, but that feels dangerous and uncertain in entirely different ways—ways in which it’s a lot less clear what the show is even going to say. Here there’s never really any doubt what the basic political angle is going to be.

Of course, it’s not as though “racism is bad” is an unnecessary message in 2018. Far from it; it’s hard to think of a period in the program’s history where an overt anti-racism stance is more vital. But there are unquestionably framings of that stance that have a hell of a lot more teeth than this possibly can. Yes, the treatment of Ryan throughout the episode (and to a secondary degree Yaz) is viscerally upsetting, but it’s also framed entirely as “look at those people in the past.” They just as easily and justifiably could have hurled racist abuse at him in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. They’ll be perfectly able to next week. The fact that this is unthinkable (regardless of whether it’s a good idea) tells us a lot about how limited a confrontation with the brutal materialism of racism this is.…

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In which shit is shot by Shana and me, mostly on the subject of the Ghost Monument, but often by whatever shiny thing caught our attention.

Get it here, dear listeners.…

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There’s a typical review structure where I talk about the good things for a while and then lead up to a “but” that brings it all crashing down. I liked this, though, so let’s do it the wrong way around. The biggest problem is in the resolution, and what it ends up doing to the sense of pacing. Having Angstrom and Enzo simply vanish into thin air with all the implications of their characters being left entirely unresolved is deeply weird, or at least it would be if it came from someone other than the guy who found no implications to consider in the Doctor committing stone cold murder in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and who wrote the bewilderingly misshapen The Power of Three. As it stands, it’s a deeply worrisome “ooh, you still aren’t real big on dramatic unities are you?” moment. Jumping from that to a bizarrely unearned moment of the Doctor giving up hope when the TARDIS isn’t on that specific rock at that specific moment is clearly a problem. And similar problems abound. The “Ryan charges out with a gun” sequence is put together with no real thought towards the degree that it renders the already not that compelling robots an object of abject comedy for their sub-Stormtrooper aim. The Stenza reveal communicates “there is an arc” as opposed to actually feeling like anything follows from it. Most particularly, the Bedsheets of Death (clearly a better title for this episode) turning out to be mind-readers that try to terrify you is not set up well at all.

So clearly this is just something we’re going to have to live with in the Chibnall era, because multiple years of pointing it out every week is going to be agonizing. Whatever pleasures are going to be offered by this phase of the show, they’re clearly not going to be rooted in the sense of how structurally tidy things are. Nor, for that matter, are they going to be rooted in any sort of vivid character work. Chibnall’s characters talk like television, and have a thinness because of it. Davies, of course, created his version of Doctor Who by stitching together bits of other television shows, but he was incredibly deft and efficient at creating vividly human characters out of these components. Chibnall isn’t doing that. Ryan and Graham are roles, not people; their dialogue about Grace and their relationship isn’t showing human trauma, it’s communicating what tropes have been chosen for them. And Yaz isn’t even that yet.

But what if we just accept that and let ourselves be pleasantly surprised if a guest writer turns up and offers that. After all, it’s nothing we hadn’t gotten good at doing for Mark Gatiss. But what is this era offering if not what most conventional aesthetics of television in 2018 consider to be basic competence? Sure, this question is implicitly damning with faint praise; Chibnall isn’t going to top any of the three previous showrunner/script editors for me. But god, I don’t want to write that for three years straight and I can’t imagine you want to read it.…

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Here’s the first of our Series 11 run of podcasts, in which I’m joined by the ever-wonderful Caitlin Smith to talk about Jodie Whittaker’s debut episode.

Thanks as ever to Pex Lives for hosting our podcast. James continues to be bad at logging into the site to announce his new releases, but there’s been an episode on Snakedance and an installment of City of the Dead since the Ithaca thing I did with James over the summer. Here’s the full list of recent episodes.…

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Well here we go again.

The easiest way to approach the Chibnall era, as a long-term fan, has been with a sort of hopeful dread. So much of the pre-publicity has been spot-on, feeling at once new and aggressively of its time. The diversity both in front of and behind the camera is demonstrated a show with its heart in the right place. It all looked very promising. The only problem is, well… we don’t need to pile on Chibnall’s past career. With more riding on this than any episode since Rose, there was a real sense of “oh god don’t fuck it up.”

Reader, they did not fuck it up. It’s comfortably Chibnall’s best Doctor Who script to date. Neither of these are the loftiest bars to clear, but they are sailed over comfortably. The Woman Who Fell to Earth never threatens to be a classic, but it never flirts with disaster either. It’s a solid, workmanlike episode. Indeed, what stands out most about it in contrast to the preceding six seasons is how straightforward and uninterested in being clever it is. Heck, the preceding ten seasons. This really isn’t invested in impressing the audience.

But that turns out to be very different from playing it safe. I’ve long noted that the main thing I want out of new Doctor Who is something I haven’t seen before. This qualifies. The pacing and way in which information is presented has fundamentally shifted. The way in which alien elements, from the transport pod to the Gathering Coil to the Doctor herself just appear without buildup is strange and off-putting. This episode goes for the Weird in a way the show hasn’t for a while. The way the Doctor works out and explains the plot is new. The dynamic, with a full-on ensemble cast, has a different rhythm to it.

Indeed, the ensemble itself is different. The first middle-aged companion, the first desi companion, and the first disabled companion. That’s quite a medley on its own, and all of it is handled with an unfussy plainness consistent with the episodes general feel of not looking for congratulations. With five new characters to establish in an hour alongside an actual plot nobody gets too fleshed out, but the early strokes are there. And everybody falls well outside both the Davies-style “companionship as self-improvement project” approach and the Moffat “quips and mythos” approach to designing a companion. So far, in fact, they’re back in the Lambert-style “well shit we accidentally got kidnapped by a crazy alien” approach, which is refreshing in the extreme.

And, of course, there’s Whittaker herself. Chibnall wisely dials back the regeneration trauma, mostly sticking to a more pro forma thing where the Doctor passes out for a bit and her forgetting her name until the big monologue  Instead Whittaker hits the ground running, immediately jumping into problem solving and general Doctoring. She’s immediately focused on what she does as an identity; notably her big monologue describes her in terms of what she does (“sorting out fair play”) and how she feels (“bit of adrenaline, dash of outrage, and a hint of panic”) as opposed to who she is.…

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