Elizabeth Sandifer

So here we are, I suppose.

It’s a pity (though an ironic one), that I already used “There Never Was a Golden Age” on Army of Ghosts/Doomsday. Because this was always going to be the problem. There’s only so forward Russell T Davies could move. The writer of Last of the Time Lords and the secretly terrible Waters of Mars was always going to show up. 

I remember this annoyance even. You can basically see it in the “End of Time” post, where my contempt boils over into calling it “an ending so absolute that it does not so much cut off the Davies era as it cuts off the abstract possibility of anything.” I felt it about every season finale of the Davies era. That frustration when the whole and the parts diverge. 

I think for me it’s “and now I must become a monster” being wasted on killing the same dipshit genocidal terror he was merrily killing last night on BBC Four. It’s not even that I mind the Doctor as this agonized raw nerve who weeps at every sparrow’s fall because he is, as this seems to ultimately conclude, secretly the god of life. It’s just that… that’s it. We spend a bunch of time doing “you made me into this” for the awful moral horror of cutting a rope and throwing the space balrog into the time lava. Like, sure,  evil bat K-9 looks better bouncing about in the title sequence than the Earth did in Journey’s End, but that’s fifteen years and a pile of Disney money for you. It’s still a scene where you don’t imagine Ncuti Gatwa would have had an easier time emoting to the actual visual instead of a tennis ball. It’s emotionally hollow. It has nothing to say about anything other than itself.

It even tells you as much whilst making its more successful no-sell of having Ruby’s mother be a perfectly ordinary woman. “She was important because we think she’s important.” It’s the season finale of midlist Disney+ cult series Doctor Who, and so it’s time to give the Doctor a long night of the soul. But it’s worth thinking about what makes that beat successful. We go from there to that stuttering beat of Ruby realizing she needs to stay on the other side of the magic door—those glances down to her phone, all of it absolutely magnetic. For one thing, this requires selling the mundanity of that side of the door. For another, it’s a genuinely new emotional beat. Which is to say that it’s interesting, a concept that, ironically, is far more important than importance. But more than anything, it is at least something we’ve spent time thinking is important. We’ve spent seven weeks with Ruby, after meeting her back at Christmas, and the whole time wanting to know who her mother was has been the most plainly important thing to her in her life. We’ve spent thirty minutes with Sutekh. Plus he’s a cunt.…

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This is, of course, the easy episode. Since the structure was developed with Bad Wolf, there’s yet to be a bad first half of a season finale. Even the Chibnall era couldn’t fuck it up. I’m not about to suggest that Davies broke the pattern, but there are plenty of grounds to accuse him of trying. That’s not a bad thing, inherently. Much of this season has comprised of efforts to reshape the rules of how Doctor Who works, which you necessarily do by breaking them. And let’s be clear, it’s had a winning record. Its weakest showings, however, have all come around the basic question of narrative cohesion and pacing, a situation that leaves us in the unfortunate position of having the TARDIS arbitrarily crash into UNIT tower so the Doctor can jump out and basically proclaim “let’s start the season finale.” 

Of course, the decisions that made that slapdash stumble into the concluding two-parter were generally cases of going too fast, which is a weird complaint to make about an episode that goes twenty minutes before it actually bothers having anything happen. The first ten minutes straight are spent standing around UNIT HQ explaining the plot. The amount of rehash this requires is significant. We have to reintroduce the UNIT cast, then introduce the rest of the UNIT cast, recap the Susan Twist mystery, recap The Church on Ruby Road, and run through the contents of Reddit for the last several weeks. Perversely, Davies manages to pile a regeneration explanation in there too. It’s not until that through the wall wipe to Mel that we actually move out of UNIT HQ, Mel’s previous appearances having amounted to standing around UNIT HQ watching Doctor Who on television.

There is, of course, great stuff in there. I mean, of course there is. Look at this cast. They have more than enough chops to let the story roll along merrily through this first act, wittily scoffing at the S TRIAD anagram, setting up a CCTV camera that’s 72.18 yards away, and generally ricocheting through what is, admittedly, a rather large pile of crimson-hued fish to strew around. But… yeesh. It sure is just declaring the commencement of an Arc Episode, as it were. 

And then the second ten minutes just has to accomplish the same thing with some set changes for variety. Gotta reintroduce Carla and Mrs. Flood, spend the actual time we need with Susan Triad, and then, well, return to UNIT HQ for seven minutes to recap Susan Foreman and invent the “Time Window” so we can actually get on with advancing the plot by turning the damn thing on. The plot, of course, is just the gathering cliffhanger reveal. Ten minutes drifting into horror and revealing our Gabriel Woolf voiced monster, then we split the party so we can cross-cut excitedly and just let Murray Gold crescendo for the remainder of the runtime. That’s it. The reason there’s no next time trailer, by and large, is that we just watched a forty minute one. …

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It was not what I expected, which remains inherently high praise for Doctor Who. Part of this was deliberate misdirection. Our eponymous character was previewed as menacing, the post-Ruby Road trailer painting him as a traitor. What we get is him hovering over everything until he’s deployed out of nowhere to defuse Face the Raven in miniature and allow the episode to have no finale set-up whatsoever. It’s sly. Roguish even. As the first script since The Haunting of Villa Diodati to be written by someone who did not write for Series Three in 2007, which is a problem, it makes a charming impression. Certainly it makes you wish Kate Herron had done more than just direct Loki. 

It’s anchored by a phenomenal cast—a fact it establishes by the four minute mark, with a one-two reveal of Indira Varma and Jonathan Groff, a duo prestige dramas from the days of HBO Go would have cut your throat for. Varma’s delivery of “a very difficult cheese” is a four course meal’s worth of old school Doctor Who acting from the days of KERA 13, where Jonathan Groff has blissfully never seen the work of Philip Madoc or Kate O’Mara and so comes to “can you do Captain Jack with less sexual harassment” pleasantly fresh. Gatwa, meanwhile, remains firmly from the days of Disney+, and is given acres of space to do it. 

“Acres of space” describes it in a lot of ways, in fact. Malevolent space cosplayers is an absolutely phenomenal conceit for a monster of the week—a genre in which we’ve not even had a sincere contender since, what, the Mire? They’ve even got a good name. But they’re a complex premise as these things go, and the episode wisely paces itself around that fact. The effect is to let everyone just vibe in their Bridgerton riffs. The way in which Gatwa is on Doctor Who Unleashed absolutely cackling at his chemistry with Jonathan Groff suggests quite a lot of fun was had with it. 

I keep coming back to that word. Fun is not my favorite concept, which I recognize is a me problem, but it’s nice to have it. Certainly it’s nice to see it had with such confidence. Bridgerton, notably, helped push Boom down to a season low 18th in the ratings with its four episode drop, half of which edged it out. Issuing a response episode in three weeks rivals “Meet the Grahams” in ruthless efficiency. This is stylish and knows it. 

As a viewer with fun issues who’s not actually seen Bridgerton I’m not quite its target audience.  I’m still too fussed on earning your emotional beats—selling the Doctor/Rogue romance better, instead of just bluntly tropesing in. But this is, again, a me problem at this point. This is plainly a show that’s got mojo. 

Let’s return to that notion of expectations. This was the episode I was looking forward to least on the whole. It had midseason filler written all over it.…

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Nothing about this should work. Off the bat, it’s sandbagged by being a second Doctor-lite episode in a row. And for those terminally irked by Space Babies—and I’m certainly at all curious how that’s going to do in the rewatch—this displays nearly all the tendencies that, if not why the episode was bad, at least very much set it up to fail. Which is to say, this is Russell T Davies in his always controversial farting aliens mode, to the point of featuring a character named Dr. Pee. Indeed, nearly every proper noun save “Gothic Paul” designed to be annoying. On top of that it features a sixty-one year old man writing about the evils of social media, taking to nuanced satire is like a backhoe to gardening. Its main conceit is a social media bubble that literally prevents people from seeing what’s right in front of them, its main character unable to even walk without her device’s assistance. And then, after forty minutes of this, Russell T Davies decides that he should probably address racism.

The most obvious thing to say, right off the bat, is that Gatwa makes this, effortlessly shifting gears through the Doctor’s increasing desperation before going off into an actorial guitar solo of gesture and expression. First the shocked horror, then the hysterical laughter, and then that awful, brilliant break into screaming before a lingering, tearful judgment that slowly hardens into contempt. It’s astonishing work, and it has to be—anything less than a standout moment to make every critic carve out a paragraph of heavy praise is going to sink the whole endeavor. That would be true even without the goofball antics of the first 95% of the episode. 

But there’s something innately off about crediting the success of a Doctor-lite episode exclusively to the Doctor. Yes, this one makes sly use of its premise—Gatwa’s actually in an awful lot of it because you can shoot stupidly fast with a single camera angle and no set to speak of. But that’s just another reason to praise Davies, who turns in what is broadly speaking the episode everybody wanted from him when his return was announced.

The farting alien mode had, of course, already been perfected once, in the second most obvious antecedent to this, Gridlock. This is Davies building on that success. For all his satire is broad, it’s never careless. The Bubble is clever, both in its wordplay and as a visual concept, affordable now, as opposed to when Davies pitched this to Moffat. More to the point, it’s just conceptually sharp. There’s a ton of idle depth—acres of character work threaded through little details like follower counts and the little messages on people’s profiles.

But Davies also expands on the weird bleakness at the core of Gridlock, not just with the same “they’re all dead” reveal, but with an aggressive juxtaposition of the pastel-laden 60s retro-future vibe and the properly tense horror stretches. All of this sets up his final moment—that smash cut tonal whiplash from farting aliens to the nihilist Davies of Midnight and Children of Earth.…

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There’s a lot here that’s fantastic. The first eighteen minutes—the bit where we burn through the trailed premise—are delightful. Using Susan Twist and the audience’s broad knowledge that she’s arc-relevant in order to quietly sell the threat of the mysterious woman is shrewd. The entire pub scene, with its unsettling close-ups quietly ratcheting up tension before its cheeky balloon puncture of a resolution, is a great little set piece. And then the episode’s sudden lurching pace throws everything off-kilter in compelling ways. Carla going bad is just as chilling as it was in The Church on Ruby Road—doubly so after we’ve gotten to briefly (and charmingly) see her play at being a Doctor Who character by trying to solve things and successfully identify the Doctor as pottering in his shed. Jemma Redgrave has never been used better, getting to be charming and mysterious instead of just sort of chronically alarmed. (The detail of her knowing there’s something’s gone weird with time is quite a nice show of confidence.) And Millie Gibson, left to spend her first weeks on the program on a Doctor-lite episode because Ncuti Gatwa wasn’t done on Sex Education, pulls it off with brash aplomb. 

But it just doesn’t work. It’s tempting to say that the problem is yet another rushed ending that isn’t quite earned. But this broadly is earned. Ruby’s already defeated Mad Jack, in a very nice and clever bit of thinking. We’ve seen her learn things within the time jumps enough times that her figuring out the mystery feels sensible. All of the technical nuts and bolts are actually here this time, at least in terms of the dramaturgy. No, what’s lacking is, worrisomely, the same thing that was lacking in The Devil’s Chord—a sense that the fantastic conceits of this episode aren’t actually thought through.

I’m not bothered by the time loop not getting fleshed out. We’ve all seen time loops in Doctor Who. But what actually sends Ruby back across her timeline to warn herself? Why does the result of that hover 73 yards away from her? Like, I get that she’s been smeared across her own timeline—that makes sense. But with so much made of her precise distance and the fact that she can’t visually be resolved into anything other than a distance-blurred image of herself, and yet this isn’t actually a remotely logical extension of what seems to be happening. For that matter, why does she have a fear effect? I mean, shit, why does the Doctor disappear in the first place? It’s all just an arbitrary set of rules warranted on nothing save for the poetry of circular storytelling.

Likewise, what is Mad Jack? Sure, yes, some nameless horror bound within a faerie circle. You don’t need to explain that any more than you do a time loop. But that’s all he is. The Albion Party and his rise to power feel like Davies taking the weakest part of Years and Years—its actual engagement with its conceit of a fascist rise to power in Britain—and going “maybe if I did it even more sloppily.”…

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The classics are classics for a reason, and there’s little more classic than letting Moffat run rampant on some formalist bullshit. The question, really, was which Moffat we were going to get. The most obvious comparison is of course Heaven Sent, and yes—this is absolutely Doctor Who made by the guy who did Heaven Sent, with all the imperious bravado that suggests. Put him on the new Doctor and let the series show off for its second week. It’s a sound strategy.

But it’s also not the whole story. For one thing, Moffat seems to have reverted to his Last Vow and Beast Below mode of spitting venom. Davies’ episodes to date have simmered with anger, but Moffat unleashes it fully. Boom never elevates into anything like a coherent critique—its reveal of algorithmic warfare against nobody in order to sell more war is clever without ever being pointed. Still, for all it’s “old man yells at cloud storage” nature, it’s easy to like. It’s damn near the ideal case for what we could have gotten out of Moffat, at least from the perspective I tend to hold.

There’s a third aspect here though, in the chaotic jumble that is the ending. Last week I compared the not quite baked denouement to Series 7 Moffat, when his narrative acceleration got out of control. And that’s in play here, with an ending that’s less concerned with earning itself than it is with ricocheting through the concept’s extremes. This could, obviously, be a problem. Arguably it is—I don’t think many people are going to call this Moffat’s greatest triumph, and that’s probably mostly down to its slightly stumbling ending.

Equally, Series 7 Moffat always felt like Moffat drifting out of focus. In an unhappy production situation he ground out television that felt half-baked. Whereas in the wake of six episodes worth of neo-Davies, it’s clearly a conscious choice that’s quite in keeping with last episode’s somewhat dubious relationship with resolution. If this is anything, it’s the Moffat of Heaven Sent having seen (or at least read) The Giggle. Whether it’s a successful choice will to a real extent be up to people other than middle-aged media critics. Rules and storytelling conventions shift, and if Moffat got out ahead of himself a decade ago, that says very little about now. If this is a hit then playing it this loose will be vindicated. If it stumbles, there’ll be plenty to Monday morning quarterback about. 

For my part… I mean, I basically liked Series 7 and was quite charmed by The Giggle.  Yeah, the former was the nadir of the Moffat era, but the reality is that the nadir of the Moffat era is still more likely to get a rewatch out of me than half of the RTD1 era, to say nothing of Chibnall. As for the latter, while its legacy is very much being discovered, it remains extraordinarily fun in the moment. 

The pleasures, then. Gatwa, obviously. Faced with “hey can you do Heaven Sent” in his third production block, as a fun challenge to follow up his first season premiere, he does his fellow Scotsman proud.…

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Now that’s something I haven’t seen before.

What is perhaps most impressive is the way in which it drops the hammer and simply never lets up. Once Jinx Monsoon crawls out of the piano the show simply works this way now. It does not worry about whether anyone will be confused by the fact that it works this way now. It just does. The universe is menaced by the Gods of Faggotry, the Doctor can hear non-diegetic music, and there’s always a twist at the end. It’s a gorgeous one-two punch with Space Babies, completing a magic trick in which, Doctor Who transforms before our eyes from a 2008 nostalgia piece into something startlingly unfamiliar, all in the space of Flux.

Let’s harp on the flaws, just to give a win to the people who are annoyed that I actually like the show. There’s a frustrating nothingness to the resolution. I mean, really, that stuttering ending, with its repeated promise of a twist and we don’t even go back to Susan, whether Foreman or Twist? The villain being defeated because Paul McCartney and John Lennon happen to walk down a hallway, such that the Doctor and Ruby are basically bystanders? This is the closest Doctor Who has been to functioning on pure spectacle since The Claws of Axos.

But come on. To paraphrase Ncuti Gatwa himself, The Claws of Axos fucks. This is absolutely bonkers fun. A tremendous amount of credit for that is down to Jinkx Monsoon, who effortlessly outpaces Graham Crowden himself in percentage of story spent at eleven. She takes the firm foundation laid by Neil Patrick Harris and stretches it to its absolute limits to produce the most memorable villain performance since Michelle Gomez. But as a performance, it’s well-tailored to Gatwa’s Doctor. Never before have we had a Doctor whose core strength is that he’s exquisitely good at melodrama. His performance lingers in the extremes of emotion. He does not so much swing between them as flicker—a series of maximalist emotings executed with devastating charisma. It evokes Nicolas Cage in its mindful dismissal of naturalism, and the result feels breathtakingly fresh.

The short straw in all of this goes to Millie Gibson, who has little to do but keep up. She doubtless fares slightly better among the roughly 100% of the audience who don’t look at her showpiece section of the episode and go “oh, we’re redoing Pyramids of Mars,” and actually does that bit quite well, but for most of the episode’s runtime she’s stuck being the one person who isn’t allowed to be maximalist. But even she plays a weak hand well.

I compared Space Babies to Rose, and it’s similarly helpful to compare this to The End of the World. In both cases the show is stressing how weird it can be. But as with Space Babies, there’s a sense of throwing caution to the wind. The End of the World was concerned with making sure the audience would accept its grinning excesses.…

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First off, a note on how I did these, given the oddness of the release structure. I’ve just come upstairs from watching Space Babies, and I’m writing this main section and putting it up on Patreon. Then I’m going to go watch The Devil’s Chord, and do the same for it. After that I’ll fill in bullet points on each, and see what’s going on with the Patreon level and whether these go on the main site yet. 

There was a trend among the reviews that started popping up last week where they suggested Space Babies was a pretty by the numbers Russell T Davies story, and that things got more interesting with The Devil’s Chord. And you can see what they meant right away. Nothing in this is surprising, at least to people who have seen any Doctor Who. It’s not as strictly RTD-by-numbers as those reviews suggest—there’s a lot of Moffat in here. But it’s immensely standard. The uncharitable thing to say is that it probably is going to benefit from having a second episode released alongside it, and it might even be true. It certainly falls short of my usual standard from Doctor Who that I want it to show me something I haven’t seen before.

But that’s probably the professional Doctor Who nerd in me talking. This is making the same basic move as The Star Beast, catering to a UK terrestrial audience with a “look, it’s Doctor Who, that thing you like” episode. If it’s over-cautious, it’s at least deliberate in that. And you can see why they thought it might be a good idea. It’s a showcase for Gatwa and Gibson—forty-five minutes of trad set pieces to let them demonstrate their specific flavor of charisma. And more to the point, even though it’s their fourth episode together from a filming perspective, it’s an opportunity for Gatwa and Gibson to put their stamp on those basics. One of the standard things chefs are asked to do in job interviews is to make an omelet, because an omelet is an effective test of a lot of fundamental kitchen skills. This is much the same.

Gatwa and Gibson, at least, prove solid cooks. There’s a fizz to their charisma—a ricocheting energy as they amp each other up. Gatwa described the dynamic as best friends who love getting in trouble together, and it’s spot on. The middle of the episode runs largely on the quality of the eponymous visual, and much of what sells the bonkers charm of space babies is just how much fun the Doctor and Ruby seem to be having with the concept. And when the third act begins a chain of rapid reveals, they similarly sell each a-ha with a breathless urgency, so that the plot tumbles giddily through its explanation. This is clearly going to be fun.

Where things stumble is the first quarter, labored as it is with “explain the lore for all those Americans on Disney+.” Gatwa and Gibson’s energy is enough to keep it out of trouble, but you find yourself thinking that maybe “two hearts” could have been saved for later in the season.…

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