Elizabeth Sandifer

The problem here—if you even want to call it a problem—is that absolutely none of the plot beats are earned or make a goddamn lick of sense. Abena is almost wholly swallowed in the mix, the Barber is wildly too complicated a premise to justify in the time allotted, none of the characters in the barbershop are fleshed out, and the plot is little more than a bunch of themes gesticulating wildly. I’m sure that, if I were to bother looking up other people’s reviews and reactions, I’d see loads of complaints about the plot holes, just like last week when an unusually large number of people apparently noticed that UNIT stories don’t make any sense for the first time.

The truth is, I have any amount of sympathy for this view. As an actual watch this was uneven; I’m not actually sure I enjoyed the experience more than last week. But reviews are about more than whether or not you liked something. Really, they’re barely about that at all. Honestly, my brain forms the thought “what will it mean to like or dislike this” as quickly as “do I like this.” I’ve got ideological positions to establish. So what do I want to think about this episode?

I find myself going back to Ghost Light. The complaint with that episode is that it doesn’t actually cohere. And I largely dismissed that complaint back in the day, pointing out that all of the components of the story were pointing in the same aesthetic direction, and that this helped paper over the gaps—an argument I’m pretty sure I stole from Miles and Wood. You can flesh that out a bit by saying that Ghost Light has too many ideas for three episodes, and so doesn’t quite manage to join all the dots, even as it’s clear the dots can be joined. Indeed, that’s part of Ghost Light’s charm—the way the story is bursting at the seams with ideas. Here we have something similar, except that instead of cramming too many ideas into a seventy-three minute container we’re doing forty-eight minutes, leaving everything even more jammed in.

Is that a bridge too far in terms of compression? Probably, actually. But it’s where we are on Doctor Who these days. It’s certainly not interesting to take ambivalence about the current format of Doctor Who out on an individual episode, and even if I were going to do that, I wouldn’t pick the one by a Black writer set in Nigeria with an almost completely non-white cast to suddenly do it, even if it does offer a clearer illustration than most of just how overstuffed the show is these days.

But look, what’s the alternative? A show that doesn’t take big conceptual swings, doesn’t tap playwrights from diverse backgrounds to write scripts despite their lack of TV experience, doesn’t treat its apparent limitations as challenges to meet? We could have a nice tidy procession of bases under siege and alien invasions and land comfortably within the realm of what the show can do.…

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Looking at the episodes this season and what we knew about them, this one was very much the one you least knew quite what was going to be. Big dumb robot premiere was dumb, Lux always had promise, and the Midnight sequel always sounded desperate. If you’re wondering, next week should be absolutely great, the one after that has promise, and then it’s all just Russell T Davies narrative collapse finale unknowns where the joke is that the series really does go on hiatus after. But this one, this one was enough question marks to make a sweater vest. Doctor lite, clearly going to set up the finale somehow, by Pete McTighe. That’s what what we had. And now, having watched it, it turns out I still don’t know what the fuck it’s gonna be. 

For the most part, over its forty-five minutes, that works to its advantage. It’s a marvelously off-kilter thing, never settling on a single coherent tone or identity. It comes in on a Love and Monsters thing, does a quick bit of folk horror, and then just runs around breaking things for the latter half of the episode before just ending in a cliffhanger. It has the kind of manic energy of a Baker/Martin script—a kind of underlit Claws of Axos. 

The glue that holds it together is Conrad, who is both written and played with a kind of magnificent heel energy. The initial relationship with Ruby is just sort of a pile of red flags on every side—he’s coming on too strong, whereas she’s got the fucky power dynamic of having all the secrets about the weird thing he’s clearly obsessed over. By the time he doesn’t take the antidote because he “wanted to be brave like the Doctor” we desperately want to yeet him into the sun, and once he goes full supervillain he’s just absolutely awful every time he’s on the screen. He’s abrasive to every status quo the episode alights on, which drives a lot of the episodes forward-toppling momentum. It pays real dividends for Kate’s “going too far” bit, because honestly you’re kind of on team “eat the bastard” until Kate goes properly unhinged with her taunting of him. And just when the episode seems to have resolved into something you get that properly odd coda of him mocking the special effects and getting his arm bitten off. By the time the Doctor reappears for the final confrontation in the TARDIS it’s not even clear whether this is supposed to be a “gone too far” beat the Doctor gets punished for. It’s heady, thrilling stuff.

I suspect, however, that I’ll never enjoy it quite as much again. Once its Mrs. Flood jailbreak resolves itself into the thematically similarly named Wish World and the nature of this mishmash does, in fact, have to resolve, this is going to get stuck as a collection of scenes and rising action with no self-contained payoff. There’s a faint absurdity to the inevitable question of deciding if it’s better or worse than Tooth and Claw or Planet of Evil in that vast shrugging middle of a Doctor Who ranking. …

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More than most episodes, it pivots in the middle, at the Midnight reveal. I knew it was coming, because that’s how life is, and was sus. And I can’t say I liked it. I stared bitterly at the sequence of mounting realization. Especially because it’s so unprompted. “We don’t know what it is”? Seriously? That’s what tips the Doctor off and starts the “do you recognize the plot of Midnight” run, saying “XTonic” and “diamond mine” before doing the title drop and running the quick clips of a, and I’m sorry to do this to you, seventeen year old piece of television. Now, admittedly that seventeen year old piece of television was seen by more than twice as many people as The Robot Revolution, so maybe it’s fair enough to do a throwback seven years longer than bringing back Omega for Arc of Infinity, the previous benchmark for “wait, seriously?” in sequel reveals. 

But, to quote the trolls on GallifreyBase, this is cancellation shit. I mean for gods’ sake, it’s even a fucking Saward homage. By the time we’ve gotten to this reveal absolutely nothing in the episode had come close to “something I haven’t seen before,” and my memory only really needs to go as far back as Flux for that to be true. After a cold open TARDIS scene recapping the season and doing an arbitrary needle drop on “Toxic” (I suppose that I need to go back to The End of the World for) it’s just twenty minutes of standard issue sci-fi gubbins—running around on a video game set pointing guns at things. It’s clearly working its way towards horror because modern Doctor Who only uses military sci-fi for a few things, and besides it’s called The Well, but it hasn’t even gotten around to being scary yet. The only interesting material comes in the grace notes around Aliss and her deafness, another example of his determination to virtue signal leading Davies in a useful direction by reminding him that some human drama might be worth adding. And then we get this bland callback reveal. Reader, I am making a face.

It’s not even the same monster! Midnight is vocal repetition; the thing that’s behind you is Hide, which you’d be hard pressed to do a callback to. I’m utterly unsurprised that what’s happened is they belatedly threw out Sharma Angel-Warfall’s actual script, which was an attempt at giving Gatwa his “Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Orisha” request, and just subbed the Midnight explanation in, because it’s an absolute fucking nothing that reeks of a desperate 48 hour rewrite. There’s no reason for it other than giving them something to hype in the behind the scenes footage. Which, I suppose once again making episodes with legs for streaming is a sound strategy. If we get a third season out of Disney it’ll probably be down to the long tail numbers. But I am still just not vibing.

Ironically, then, the back half is rather good.…

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Well it’s nice that Gatwa gets a perfect episode. He’d not really had one yet, save perhaps Dot and Bubble. But here we’ve got one that it’s legitimately hard to see getting unseated as my season favorite. More to the point, we’ve got one you can just unapologetically hand to your lapsed fan friend and go “look, it’s good again.” It’s probably even worth doing—boosting the Disney+ numbers can’t hurt lolsob. Just a stone cold classic, everything you want from Doctor Who episode. I’m still grinning. Best episode since Hell Bent. 

In terms of actually reviewing it, let me take a moment from my notes document and unpack it for you. I’ve just transcribed the we just end/but that is death deadline, which I followed with, and I quote, “RUSSELL WHAT ARE YOU DOING.” I stress that this is entirely affectionate—a fannish love of the writer of It’s a Sin and Cucumber taking his stock imagery of death and doing a speed run remake of Love and Monsters with it. On the television, the tempo kicks up a bit for our promised third act change, and I’m all but liveblogging: “The Doctor crying, Murray Gold having a nervous breakdown, Penn cackling on the sofa.” It’s absolutely ecstatically good—the triumphant capstone to a fifteen minute showpiece of ostentatiously clever bullshit reaching back to a Scooby-Doo pastiche animated Ncuti Gatwa fretting that he has a two-dimensional brain. Technically, if I wanted to be a complete hardass, I could complain that I have, in fact, seen this before, but come the fuck on. I’m not going to complain about burning up another pile of Disney money on a Mind Robber remake. I’m going to cackle with my husband.

Literally everything about this episode is great. Mr. Ring-a-Ding is simply one of the greatest visuals in the history of the series, and I cannot wait to get to Doctor Who Confidential and watch Russell use a bunch of superlatives about how they did it. From his opening appearance, casually rendered in pitch perfect Ub Iwerks loops to him facing off with the Doctor in the lush art deco cinema to his ascension into the realms above Kether he simply always looks good. The script dances through its set pieces with a nimbleness not seen since at least The Giggle, if not World Enough and Time. Gatwa and Sethu absolutely kill it in every scene. It does not remotely make it look easy, but it oozes with casual confidence at every turn. 

It is in fact four perfectly executed acts. A cold open establishing the villain in the bonkers poetry of moonlight reflecting off a silver spoon, a tight investigation of, as Gatwa delightfully summarizes it, “literally an old caretaker in a haunted cinema,” the metafictional ecstasy of the middle, and then an nicely paced denouement in which the guns on the mantlepiece go off in well-structured sequence. Each one could be unpacked at length, and I look forward to going back and doing so in the context of Gatwa Eruditorum, whenever that may be.…

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It’s strange, in many ways, to be back, or at least back under these circumstances, watching Doctor Who tick down to the first time since Time of the Doctor  that an episode will air when the next episode hasn’t been shot. And that was a two week period towards a commissioned episode—Deep Breath shot in January. Here we head towards the great unknown, perhaps even the wilderness. It’s faintly unsettling—I’ve not written about Doctor Who in a moment where it might not come back before.

What’s interesting, of course, is that this was all shot and prepared with no knowledge of that—this entire season was in the can before 73 Yards aired, and so is not in a position to respond to the anxieties about its own performance. As far as the show knows, Davies is still the triumphant returning hero. In the latter stretches they’ll know the 60th Anniversary stuff landed. This is, I suspect, to the series’ benefit—it’s in no position to second guess itself. It doesn’t know it’s going to be going out under cancellation fears as the global economy collapses and the United States succumbs to fascism. So it just comes out swinging.

The result has pleasing Cartmel vibes. “Planet of the incels” is the obvious line to point at, and Davies is plainly fishing for praise with it, but the point remains: Doctor Who is aiming at the right fascists here. It’s angry and has a head full of steam. This is good and as it should be. On top of that, it’s pretty well assembled, especially by the standards of the Gatwa era to date. Obviously it’s gorgeous, with a lushly camp 50s retro-future. The basic idea of a star registry certificate being a real and valid document is great. “Belindachandrabombs” has a delightful frisson of comedy and barbarity. There’s lots to love here.

It also doesn’t bottle the ending as badly as much of Series 1 seemed to. In some ways this is me in the odd position of praising the show for the fact that the Alan reveal and the use of the star certificates to defeat him were both extremely obvious, but in an era where the episode resolutions have so frequently been off it’s nice to have everything successfully telegraphed. To some extent this is accomplished by moving the duff bit of pacing to the midpoint instead—the beat where Belinda reactivates the polish droid so she gets captured doesn’t feel entirely earned. But the middle of the episode is a good place to bury your sketchy beat.

And yet there’s a sense of the episode as a bunch of parts in search of a whole. The moment I find telling comes at the beginning. Davies does a quick set of establishing beats for Belinda—stuff we’ve seen a thousand times, and that he does as well as ever. We get her harried at work, then straight to a flatshare situation, and with that we’ve efficiently sketched a skilled career woman in a world where that gets you fuck all.…

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Just wanted to give the note that the Patreon is currently slightly short—about $20—of the threshold where my Robot Revolution review will be posted publicly. I’m reasonably confident that gap will be bridged some time in the next five days, but it’s where we are.

In any case, reviews should go out Saturday mornings/afternoons at some point. With episodes dropping at 3am my time, I expect to watch them when I get up on Saturday. The exact shape of this is going to be a bit tricky, as Saturday is also the Ithaca Farmer’s Market, where I do my shopping, and also I have prior commitments for the first two weeks that were on my calendar before we had a launch date, but I’ll figure out the routine that works best, and getting reviews out as fast as possible remains a priority for me.

A final note that this is the last season whose “post publicly” threshold will be $2850. That number’s always been keyed to my rent, and that’s going up at the end of the summer, so by the time The War Between the Land and Sea airs, the public review threshold will have jumped to $2920.

In addition to helping reviews be public, of course, my Patrons already have access to the first chapter of Last War in Albion v4, early chapters of my Blake book, the magical zines Penn has been working on, and will be getting a pair of politics/AI/fascism essays in the near future.

Thanks for reading, and I’m sure I’ll see you all on Saturday.

And here’s that Patreon link again.…

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First off, I want to note that technically Penn’s and my Patreon is well short of where it should be for me to be doing this. I ain’t no grinch, and so I’m posting publicly anyway, but seriously, it’s a pretty sizeable shortfall in our monthly budgeting. I’m currently finishing up the epic Neil Gaiman section of Last War in Albion over on the Patreon, which you’ll see here in a few months, and I’ve also finally started work on my inevitable Blake book, so it’s an exciting time.  And besides. Next episode isn’t at Christmas and I can grinch it up as much as I want.

Right. On to the fun stuff, or at least this curious little thing we’re calling the Gatwa era, and may someday find out if we’ll be calling it that for more than another eight episodes. Let’s start with the obvious: this is loads of fun, in a big dumb Christmassy way. Yes, obviously this is not my favorite mode of Moffat because I’m a basic bitch who prefers dark and epic Doctor Who to comedy. But it’s still Moffat, with all his weird little idiosyncrasies, which at this point feel like pulling your favorite jacket off the rack and slipping it on. I in no way hope he takes over again after Davies (though I suspect I’d be hard-pressed to actually be unhappy if it happened), but this is always going to be the most straightforwardly “my Doctor Who” there is. The bit at the start where the Doctor realizes he’s seen something because he’s suiting up—nobody else writes that particular Doctor, and I just plain vibe.

This one even avoids Moffat’s standard tics more than Boom did. There’s a bootstrap paradox and a long way around, and there’s not a single other writer who would have done that Christmas farce cold open, but this isn’t a “play the hits” episode in the same way. In some ways it’s much closer to “play the misses”—I remember seeing the AV Club’s review drop a few days ago and being utterly bemused at its longing for the classic Moffat specials of yesteryear like The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe and The Return of Doctor Mysterio, which this was apparently not as good as, and feeling like I should quickly Google how The Berenstain Bears are spelled to make sure I was still in the correct reality. 

Mostly, though, this feels like its own thing. Boom came early enough in the Gatwa era that everything was up in the air, such that it felt like Gatwa doing a Moffat episode as part of the work of establishing himself and figuring out what this show is. This, on the other hand, feels like Moffat doing a Gatwa episode, which is to say that it feels like Gatwa-era Doctor Who is a defined enough thing to riff upon. The death of the hotel manager is a good example—Gatwa’s Doctor simply handles that emotional beat differently than Smith or Capaldi would have, and Moffat writes it accordingly. …

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