Elizabeth Sandifer

It’s December 9th, 2018. “Thank U Next” hasn’t gone anywhere. Mark Ronson ft. Miley Cyrus, James Arthur & Anne Marie, Dalton Harris ft. James Arthur, and Mariah Carey also all chart, the latter with “All I Want For Christmas is You” clocking its 89th week on the charts. In news, Brexit continues to shamble along, with Teresa May’s deal visibly collapsing at the last minute and seeing its Parliamentary vote delayed. That’s about it, actually. Nothing else happens. 

Which also describes television, where we have The Battle of Randall O’Connor. Since this is emphatically drawing on The Woman Who Fell to Earth, let’s follow suit, and check in with that sense of optimism that pervaded it. Obviously the Chibnall era was not an immediate success, and my coverage of the previous nine episodes has made that clear. But that was all with the benefit of hindsight. Let’s return to the 2018 that existed. Then, if you were the sort of person naive enough to engage in redemptive readings, you could still just about make it through to the end of It Takes You Away with an intact sense of optimism to the effect of “maybe this will be about as good as Torchwood.” Sure, Chibnall’s four episodes had all been quite weak, but none had been abysmal trainwrecks. Rosa was broadly competent if unsettling, Demons of the Punjab actually good, the rest various flavors of inoffensive adequacy or Kerblam! Chibnall was clearly going to be a comedown from the previous two eras, but maybe he could muster up the occasional gems of brilliance, the odd Caves of Androzani or City of Death over a few years. There was hope, at least, right?

And then comes The Battle of Rebused Obamas, and all hope ran into the threshing blades of oblivion. It is difficult to express the way in which The Battle of Raymour and Flanigan constitutes an existential horror within Doctor Who. There are relatively few comparisons, really—episodes that suck  in ways that do not merely implicate themselves, but that expose in their ineptness fundamental and bedrock inadequacies capable of yielding up the program’s handful of truly tainted eras.  The Twin Dilemma, obviously. The TV Movie, not that its threat was ever acted on. The Invisible Enemy and The Celestial Toymaker both marked a similar sort of lurching drop in quality, but the resultant eras still produced multiple highlights. I guess there’s Cyberwoman.

What is so galling about this, in the end, is that it’s the season finale. Sure, many bad episodes of Doctor Who have, over the years, been season finales, from the modern flops of Last of the Time Lords and The Wedding of River Song to the old school damp squibs of The Invasion of Time or The Time Monster. But in the well-honed shape of modern Doctor Who, the finale has something of a place of honor. Even the bad ones are busted masterpieces, with ambitions gone amiss. That is not what we have here.…

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It’s December 2nd, 2018. Ariana Grande continues her dominion over the charts. The rest of the top ten simply shuffles, save for the entrance of Ava Max to the top ten. All is sameness. Nothing ever changes. In news, the Yellow Vest movement erupts in France. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen pleads guilty of lying to Congress as part of his general turn against his former employer. Brexit continues to be a complete fucking shambles. Like I said, nothing changes. 

While on television, It Takes You Away. Lance Parkin, when espousing his distaste for the Chibnall era on Facebook, likes to point to this episode, and specifically the beat at the end in which Ryan informs Graham, “Yaz said you saw Nan in there.” And fair enough, this is the sort of line that an even vaguely competent editor would circle and, if they’re being polite, leave a note to the effect of “I think this emotional beat needs more,” instead of what they are actually thinking here, which is “how the fuck did you fail to give Ryan a single reaction scene to the return of his dead grandmother?” It’s immensely hackish, mediocre, and lazy writing, in the same way that shaky-cam and some blue lit foam rubber rocks is immensely hackish, mediocre, and lazy representation of a collapsing antizone. And that’s before you get to minor but revealing questions like “I wonder exactly at what point during preproduction anyone at the BBC thought to call the effects team and double check that they can do a convincing frog, and why, after an answer that must have just been five minutes of laughing down the phone, they put it in the script anyway,” which, although in practice it just led to a kind of charming giant rat moment, does not exactly speak well of the basic ability of this creative team to make television.

On the other hand, although its ineptitudes are particularly jarring, there’s a competence here that the era usually lacks. There are emotional throughlines that get where they’re going, if not always with especial grace. On the whole, this is an easy episode to like. There’s a genuine weirdness to it—a conventional light horror opening gives way to the weird children’s dark fantasy of the antizone, as for essentially the first time ever we get Doctor Who’s version of Labyrinth. And then this in turn gives way to a conclusion about a lonely cosmic force that wants to be a frog and have a friend. It’s bonkers, but in the best possible ways, a “mad as in exiting” buzz of ideas that freely revels in the basic joy of Doctor Who’s flexibility. This is the sort of thing that, broadly speaking, I eat up in Doctor Who, and would be fundamentally pretty delightful even in an era where this was a bit below par, as it should be, instead of a highlight.

So once again we find ourselves with the basic issue that’s underlaid this run of four posts covering the non-Chibnall portions of Series 11.…

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It’s November 25^th, 2018. Ariana Grande continues to be on top of a top ten chart that is basically unaltered from last week save for a couple minor shufflings of position—Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper, Rita Ora, and Dave ft Fredo fall, Jess Glynne and Little Mix ft. Nicki Minaj rise. It is again the definition of a slow news week, dominated by the slow fallout of Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination nearly two months earlier and the release of yet another one of those scientific reports that tries very hard to stress that we are all going to die unless we do something about climate change, followed, inevitably, by a lack of doing anything. Past that, it’s so tedious that The New York Times runs a front-page story on the forced retirement of drug-sniffing dogs in the wake of cannabis legalization, at least until the day this airs, when the European Union finally signs off on a Brexit agreement. Spoilers: it’s going to remain a fucking clown show.

On television, meanwhile, The Witchfinders. Let’s start at the core of this episode. A celebrity historical with a prominent and acclaimed guest actor is a particularly good vehicle for the tradition whereby, early in a new Doctor’s run, they are given a scene with a skilled veteran actor to see what happens. Eccleston got it with Simon Callow, Tennant with Pauline Collins and Anthony Head, Smith with Ian McNeice and Iain Glen, and Coleman with Peter Capaldi. With Rosa being about the weighty weight of its weighty political issues instead of the actors, it takes Whittaker until her second celebrity historical to get to do this, and she ends up drawing Alan Cumming, making his first appearance in Doctor Who since 1993 as King James I. There’s a standard issue Doctor Who episode going on at the fringes of this, but the point of the episode—the reason it exists and wants you to tune into it—is because of the scene where King James interrogates the Doctor.

Up to this point, Cumming has been turning in a carefully mannered comedy performance. This is an interesting quirk of the script, which sets King James up as, essentially, a comedy interruptor, showing up and ensuring that the Doctor can’t straightforwardly take charge of the situation. Cumming’s performance is high grade camp, deftly moderated so as not to devour the rural horror tale around it. It’s an interesting performance, because its relative restraint serves to give Whittaker a lot to work with, but it still sets up an interesting problem—an unusual sort of character to interface with.

So what do we get when it’s finally time for the two of them to face off? Hm. Well, Alan Cumming is great, a font of tiny reactions and subtly shifting emotions. But Whittaker… OK, sure she’s not helped by a script that demands she deliver lines like “true knowledge has to be earned.” And perhaps this can all be laid at the feet of Chibnall’s Davison revivalism. But when Peter Davison played a weirdly passive Doctor he still imbued the part with the basic level of mercury it demands—his Doctor seemed to be doing things.…

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It’s November 18^th, 2018. Ariana Grande remains at number one with “Thank U, Next.” Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper, Little Mix ft. Nicki Minaj, Halsey, and Freya Ridings also chart. While in news, Theresa May announces that she has Cabinet support for her Brexit plan. Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab then resigned from the Cabinet in protest of May’s Brexit plan. So does the Secretary for Work and Pensions, but that’s not nearly as funny, is it? Also the five main bridges over the Thames in London are blocked by Extinction Rebellion protesters. Oh, and Amazon announces that it will open a headquarters in Queens, an announcement that will be rolled back three months later because, basically, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was mean to them.

Speaking of which, Kerblam! Ten minutes until the end, it could be Dark Water or World Enough and Time. Hold back that shot of the Kerblam Men til the cliffhanger and make them Cybermen, and you have the perfect setup, brilliantly executed. Like Demons of the Punjab, on a level of sheer craft, this is an episode that you do not have to make any apologies for. You could write a review of it that ended “if you don’t like this, Doctor Who probably isn’t the TV show for you” and not have to say anything that is untrue or poorly justified. This fact is crucial to understanding this episode. It is, indeed, the second most important thing about Kerblam!

The most important thing about Kerblam! is that it is staggeringly, viscerally, mind-wrenchingly evil in a way that only a bare handful of Doctor Who stories are. Most of these are, I would argue non-coincidentally, also abysmally made: The Celestial Toymaker, The Dominators, The Monster of Peladon, The Twin Dilemma, or Victory of the Daleks. Which is where the second most important thing plays in. Virtually the only point of comparison to it is The Talons of Weng-Chiang. But that was, as a matter of craft, the capstone to an absolutely astonishing classic of an era—Hinchcliffe and Holmes at their best. This is part of the Chibnall era—a “good episode in a sea of sub-mediocrity” beauty like The Caves of Androzani and City of Death, except implacably evil, unhesitatingly and unequivocally endorsing a political agenda that is, if I may conjure the spirit of Jack Graham, literally genocidal. And, you know, not nearly as good an actual episode.

The striking thing about those last two paragraphs is that nowhere in them do you find any of the stories that Kerblam! actually thinks it’s inspired by. Because what this is, under the hood, is the Chibnall era’s attempt to do an Andrew Cartmel story. This is Paradise Towers or The Happiness Patrol or Battlefield—overtly political, direct, and well executed. Except, of course, that it ends with the Doctor proclaiming that the system isn’t the problem, violent leftist activists are. This is an astonishing juxtaposition—one of the single least probable things anyone has ever tried assembling Doctor Who to do.…

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It’s November 4th, 2018. Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper continue to be “Shallow” at the top of the charts. Little Mix ft. Nicki Minaj, Calvin Harris and Sam Smith, Rita Ora, and Freya Ridings also chart.

In news, a plane crash off the coast of Java killed 189 people. Ross Edgley completed his 157 day swim around the entire coast of Great Britain. And eight hundred American troops are deployed to the Mexican border in a brazen attempt to suggest that immigrants are an invading force, although federal law meant that this was largely for show as the troops were legally prohibited from engaging in law enforcement activities and mostly repaired vehicles and operated construction equipment.

On television, meanwhile, The Tsuranga Conundrum. In the eyes of many fans, this marks a nadir of the Chibnall era, which, in the eyes of those same fans, marks a nadir of the show. One of these positions is correct, of course. But the other one is aggressively wrong, and in its wrongness implicates the other position in a way we need to untangle. This will get quite broad quite quickly, so let’s start with the actual episode, ranked in that venerable guide to greatness the Doctor Who Magazine end of year poll as the worst of the season.

Now, of course, that was also Kinda, and more recently Kill the Moon was only edged out to the position by In the Forest of the Night. But for all its failures the Doctor Who Magazine poll still represents a certain faction of fandom—one that’s been down on the Chibnall era in general. Which makes the choice of The Tsuranga Conundrum as a nadir odd, because it’s largely not. It’s undoubtedly flawed—look at the name, for heaven’s sake. Not only is there nothing that’s especially a conundrum, the bits of conundrum there are don’t especially have anything to do with Tsuranga. Also, The Pting Dilemma was right there. But there’s a basic competence to this story. In a sea of Chibnall episodes that are not so much less than the sum of their parts than they are simply a pile of parts that do not actually sum, The Tsuranga Conundrum stands out as a dull parade of science fiction cliches organized into something that can be accurately described as “a whole.” It’s only taken five episodes for that to feel like an accomplishment, but looking at Series 11 and saying, in all seriousness, that The Tsuranga Conundrum is worse than The Ghost Monument, Arachnids in the UK, and whatever the fuck the finale is called is frankly as preposterous as saying that Demons of the Punjab and It Takes You Away are not the best two stories of the season, which, of course, Doctor Who Magazine’s esteemed readers also failed to do.

What, then, is it that is so unlikeable about this episode to this particular sort of reader? One problem, undoubtedly, is the design of the Pting, which is “cute” and therefore “silly,” which remains, for a significant portion of Doctor Who fandom, something Doctor Who—a show whose most iconic monster has a toilet plunger for a hand—is apparently not supposed to be.…

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It’s October 28th, 2018. Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper are at number one with “Shallow,” a fact with which I could simply end this essay and come to much the same conclusion. Silk City ft. Dua Lipa, Post Malone ft. Swae Lee, and Little Mix ft. Nicki Minaj also chart. 

In news, a neo-nazi kills eleven people in a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Multiple attempts at mail bombs against Democratic politicians are intercepted, and a suspect is arrested in Florida. And in the UK, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, owner of Leicester City Football Club, dies in a helicopter crash outside the stadium. 

On television, meanwhile, Arachnids in the UK. Set aside any elaborate theories about the Sheffield Gothic or whatever. Set aside the ending, at least for the moment. Let’s instead focus on the part of the episode that is extremely, pointedly Doctor Who, and build out from that to see where we might end up. Because there is one aspect of this episode that is extremely, classically Doctor Who, except that it’s done so extraordinarily weirdly that basically nobody ever notices that it’s even happening, namely that the episode undergoes a massive genre shift halfway through.

No, really. Look at the opening couple minutes, with their spider-low angles, ominous woodwinds, and dark rooms. This episode emphatically begins as a horror piece—a recognizable genre within Doctor Who. It continues in this mould for almost precisely half its runtime. And then, at around the halfway mark, there is a big set piece in which Jack Robertson is ambushed in the bathroom by the giant spider. At the beginning of this scene the episode is still horror—look at the steady progression through ominous shots and building tension. The giant spider emerges, Robertson starts screaming, and suddenly his security guard Kevin bursts in, Robertson escapes, and we cut away to Jodie Whittaker being very excited about Yaz’s mum. When, about a minute later, we return to the scene, the story is a very different genre, lurching into an extended comedy bit.

The last time Doctor Who dramatically changed course exactly halfway through an episode about spiders we got a televisual ritual about our lost space-based futures. That is not what we get this time, obviously, and nowhere is that more obvious than what prompts the genre shift. It’s tempting to be petulant and to say that nothing prompts it, but that’s not true. What prompts it—the actual on-screen event that makes this episode turn decisively away from horror—is Chris Noth doing a bunch of funny faces and comedy “I’m a selfish asshole” bits as Kevin gets eaten. 

Many of the questions raised by this transition have no actual answers. Why is a mid-tier American actor best known for a supporting role on Sex and the City anchoring a mid-episode genre shift by doing comedy bits as a Donald Trump analogue? This is a question that simply cannot be answered without gazing directly into the mind of Chris Chibnall. Nevertheless, here he is, doing just that.…

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It’s October 21^st, 2018. Calvin Harris and Sam Smith are at number one with Promises, while Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, Little Mix and Nicki Minaj, Rita Ora, and Jess Glynne also chart. In news, 700,000 people led a futile and pointless protest against the implementation of Brexit, Caroll Spinney announced his retirement from playing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, and Donald Trump moots the idea of legally defining gender as biological and immutable, a clear and productive step towards finally solving the transgender problem.

While on television, what is easily the greatest and most historically significant episode in the history of Doctor Who: Rosa. When this aired, it must have looked more or less like any other celebrity historical, albeit a bit more earnest and, dare we admit it, po-faced. But with forty years of hindsight, it’s astonishing just how many common tropes in contemporary Doctor Who originated here. Most obvious, of course, is last year’s George, which bordered on a straight-up remake, with its triumphant and moving conclusion in which the Doctor calls the cops on George Floyd to ensure that history proceeds as written, a moment of chilling and visceral horror that is thankfully leavened by the genuinely moving final scene in which the Doctor talks about how one of the oxygen farms on the Elon Musk Mars Colony is named after him. With life on Earth expected to be unsustainable within just fifteen years now, this was a moving reminder of how Floyd’s noble sacrifice led directly to the establishment of the colony that will be ensuring our future, or, at least, the future of the worthy heroes who are sent there. And we wouldn’t have had it without Chris Chibnall’s brilliant Rosa lighting the way.

There were, obviously, plenty of objections at the time, though the loudest of these ceased when Critical Race Theory finally got banned and so can be safely ignored. Most of the remaining objections, meanwhile, have largely revealed themselves as strengths. The decision, for instance, to recast Rosa Parks’s defiance from part of an organized protest into an individualist moment of heroic uppitiness, while mildly ahistorical, serves to rightly de-emphasize the disruptive nature of collective action. Instead, Rosa presents its title character as the originator of the civil rights movement, with a young up and coming Martin Luther King attending meetings at her house. Note how carefully the script works here—we see the meetings, and their activist purpose is alluded to, but no actual activism takes place at the meeting so as to preserve the claim that Rosa Parks’s protest “basically kicked off the US civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King.” It’s also significant what’s erased here—Parks’s protest is held up as singular, rightly eliding Claudette Colvin, who had engaged in a similar protest nine months earlier, and who, unlike Parks, was a plaintiff in Browder v.…

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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.…

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It’s October 7^th, 2018. Calvin Harris and Sam Smith are at number one with “Promises,” with Marshmello/Bastille, Kanye West/Lil Pum, Silk City/Dua Lipa, and Rita Ora also charting. Since Peter Capaldi and David Bradley regenerated, the US government briefly shut down despite Republican control of Congress and the Presidency, Kay Goldsworthy became the first female Archbishop in the Anglican Communion, a school shooting happened in Parkland, Florida, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un met in Singapore, the first ever meeting between leaders of the two countries, noted actress Meghan Markle married an unemployed socialite, Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul, and a Swedish student named Greta Thunberg began a school strike to protest Climate change.

On television, meanwhile, The Woman Who Fell To Earth. The most important thing to realize about this is just how much everyone desperately wanted it to work. For all the noise about people not liking the idea of a female Doctor, nearly eleven million people tuned in to watch this, only the third time Doctor Who has ever managed to be the top-rated show on television for the week. For all that would happen down the road, this was a piece of television that went out to a large and sympathetic audience. Rewatching it five years later, you can still see that sense of optimism—that hope that it could all work out. Those of us familiar with Chibnall’s ouvre were largely more pessimistic, but you can go look at my review at the time and see the way in which it remained hopeful, finding the good points to seize onto. It’s not that nobody wished this era malice from the start, but the people who did were all misogynistic fucks who should be ignored on principle. The rest of us were rooting for it.

This, of course, made the result all the more crushing, and knowing what we do, it’s easy to look at this and see the flaws that would soon come to define the Chibnall era. But there’s a whole era of stories that don’t have this aura of hope and anticipated progress in which to discuss those flaws. Everyone always praises this project for its determined focus on the historical context of episodes, so let’s play to our old school strengths and peer into the shockingly distant world of 2018 and see what this was, on its own terms, such as they are.

Within the modern series, after all, a new Doctor episode is a mission statement. Not quite a manifesto—they generally have too much to do in order to pull that off—but a mission statement—a declaration of aesthetics. Rose made it clear that this was a modern post-Buffy bit of genre television with a clear eye on the history of Doctor Who. The Christmas Invasion, by focusing on everything it wasn’t changing before finally slotting David Tennant into place, declared its continuity with its hit predecessor series. The Eleventh Hour declared change, establishing the nocturnal fairy tale that would serve as Moffat’s aesthetic brand.…

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