Because He’s Got Freckles (Eve of the Daleks)

It’s January 1st, 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. But the truth is that even when Chibnall gets it right it’s shockingly easy to be a bitch about it. Like, this has the shock return of Karl, aka “that guy Tzim-Sha as hunting in The Woman Who Fell to Earth.” Do you have any idea how hard it is to pass up mocking that?
The problem is that the Chibnall era has largely been comprised of stories that are trying for mediocrity and failing. Now, after a hard fought twenty-eight episodes, it finally manages to attain it. Unlike any of Aisling Bea’s dialogue, that’s just funny.
Ah, shit, there I go again.
But the thing is, it doesn’t matter. For one thing, this was a dead era walking, seeing out a dribble of specials while Russell T Davies got his ducks in a row. It had just spectacularly failed to land its epic payoff to its nominal storylines. What was a halfway decent romp of Daleks in a warehouse going to do to change things? The story of this era and its failures was by this point written. Even if the final three specials had been some firmament-shaking triumph on the order of Face the Raven/Heaven Sent/Hell Bent that would have amounted to little more than a quizzical “where the fuck was this guy for the last four years” in terms of critical appraisal. Sure, it’d make these last three essays easier to write, but it wouldn’t change anything. And this, to put it mildly, not that.
For another, its adequacy largely just served to highlight many of the underlying problems. For instance, consider the central narrative engine of this—the ever-shrinking time loop. What’s remarkable is just that this is the first time in the whole of the Chibnall era that we’ve had an episode based around a formal mechanic like this. This sort of episode isn’t exactly a mainstay of the series, but between the Doctor-lite episodes of the Davies era and Moffat’s propensity for things like Heaven Sent and Listen, or for that matter for formalist elements like the Silence and River Song they’ve at least been a familiar aspect of the series. More to the point, they usually make for good episodes. But this is the first and only time Chibnall does one. And it’s not even an especially elaborate concept. The fact that Chibnall apparently viewed this as so complex he needed to break out the whiteboards to keep track of it all it is faintly baffling—you don’t figure Moffat was whiteboarding The Big Bang, y’know?
Likewise, much of what’s fun about this episode is that you can legitimately describe it as a Dalek rom-com—a phrase that absolutely sizzles with possibility. Very little of that possibility is realized here, but honestly, what was the last time there was a premise as fundamentally bonkers as this? The Chibnall era up to this point is largely a case of Doctor Who standards—episodes with obvious precedents in past Doctor Who stories. In a real sense this is its first sincere stab at doing something new. Rom-com isn’t a completely novel genre for Doctor Who—Love and Monsters and The Lodger both straightforwardly engage with the genre. But adding Daleks to it is properly novel—a true tonal juxtaposition of the sort that’s much more the show’s purpose than remaking 80s disasters to see if they can go even worse this time. So in effect what we have here is Chibnall trying and failing at the right ideas instead of at the wrong ones. Its big trick for finally attaining the mediocrity it’s long been searching for was to try to do something actually good and fail at that instead.
The romcom aspect of it does lead to the other interesting thing to note about Eve of the Daleks, however, which is the last minute attempt to grapple with the Yaz/Doctor ship or, as its proponents portmanteau it, Thasmin. This was, by the production team’s own admission not something that was originally part of their plans—it instead emerged out of fandom demand. But while it’s tempting to make a snide joke evincing surprise at the notion that there was a fandom to demand it, the fact of the matter is that… of course there was. Has there ever been a Doctor who wasn’t shipped with their primary companion? I suppose there’s not a lot of Hartnell ships in general, but from Twamie on through Whouffaldi it’s always been an element of the character. (And hey, it’s never too late to make One/Vicki a ship, even if it only makes for rubbish portmanteaus like Hicki or Vartnell.) What’s surprising is that Chibnall wasn’t expecting it.
Still, there’s something to be said for deciding to give the people what they wanted. Doctor/companion relationships have at this point become part of the series’ fabric, although largely as something to be foreclosed. But this is the first time the topic has been broached with a same sex Doctor/companion pairing. Much like Whittaker’s casting, it’s not nothing.
Damn close though.
The problem is… well, it’s severalfold. Obviously it’s hard to complain too much about the fact that Thasmin was deflected—the template of this story is Ten/Rose, after all, and Chibnall is flagrantly cribbing from School Reunion in his deflection. But there’s something grating, in the same way that Series 11’s run of buried gays was grating, about bringing up this idea two episodes before the era’s end jjust to shoot it down. It’s the very definition of queerbaiting—a tease followed by an ostentatious refusal to actually provide the queer representation.
This is made worse by the degree to which Chibnall simply failed to do anything with the idea. Dan outs Yaz to the Doctor, which is crass, though at least lets a character say something about this Doctor’s bewildering refusal to actually have an emotional scene with her companions when she professes not to understand what he means and he notes “I think you do. But for some reason you pretend to me,and to her, that you don’t.” Sure, that’s basically just a description of Chibnall’s naff emotional beats, but it at least makes the point.
This leads to a moment in the next episode where the Doctor carelessly describes saving the world as a date. Later, she follows up, admitting that “dates are not something I really do, you know. I mean, I used to. Have done. And if I was going to, believe me, it’d be with you. I think you’re one of the greatest people I’ve ever known. Including my wife.” But, she insists, she can’t because “at some point time always runs out.” At episode’s end she elaborates once more, saying that she “can’t fix myself to anything,” not out of lack of desire, but because “sooner or later, it’ll hurt.” And so she asks to just enjoy what they have in the moment. It’s shockingly infantile—not even the “I’ll have to watch you die” pout of Tennant’s Doctor but just a comprehensive emotional avoidance.
And I say all of this, but the thing is there are people who went nuts for this. People angry—simply furious—that David Tennant didn’t go seek out Yaz, the companion (they insist) the Doctor was canonically in love with, and take her back upon retirement. There are people for whom this was the fulfillment of their wildest dreams of a ship—the finest representation ever to represent.
I’ve seen it theorized—and god I wish I could remember who and credit them—that a lot of the people who really loved the Chibnall era are people who like to project their own emotions and depth onto the media they consume. Broadly, they specifically enjoy emotional relationships that are not explored so that they can explore them in their head. This makes any sense to me—which honestly can’t be said of the bulk of Chibnall praise. The problem is that it feels about as emotionally stunted as the Doctor’s refusal to talk about emotions.
I’m tempted to revive Gayatri Spivak with “novels are not gossip about imaginary people”—a term, to answer the longstanding question of where Spivak said this, that I first heard during a lecture from Candace Vogler, one of my professors way back in my time in the one year money factory the University of Chicago calls their humanities Masters program. She, in turn, heard it from Spivak when she was a student—Spivak apparently wielded it as something of a pedagogical mantra. Amusingly, my quoting of it in the context of Doctor Who has given it a life of its own, and the majority of Google hits on the phrase are now fandom sources that clearly got it from me, and sometimes even bother to credit that fact. (The remainder are reprints of an article by Vogler where she quoted it.) In any case, there is simply nothing to value in your internal fantasies of a fictional character’s smoldering attraction for another fictional character. These fantasies can, I will freely admit, be the inspiration for art in the medium of fanfiction, a medium I am unwilling to dismiss even as I think it falls alarmingly short of Sturgeon’s Law. But the fantasies themselves are emotional farts of shower thoughts.
For my part, this feels insulting—a smattering of stale crumbs that I’m expected to praise because they’re sapphic crumbs. That I’m not as angry about it as I am about the Timeless Child reveals my own immaturities, but make no mistake that I am angry—another continent of my implacable contempt towards this era.
This was one of the good ones. But, for all that the Doctor wishes it could go on forever, the best thing about it is still that it’s almost over.
October 28, 2024 @ 5:28 am
The wild thing about Chibnall not really doing this sort of structure experiment until his era is almost done is that he had in fact done it before in the two previous showrunners’ tenures! 42’s whole gimmick was that it unfolds in real time, and then in that Silurian two-parter we’re told the Silurian hit squad is going to reach the surface in something like 12 minutes and lo and behold, they show up about 12 minutes later. Playing with timing used to be his calling card, though I don’t think either prior experiment was entirely worth it.
I don’t rate this episode as highly as you (as low as that is) because the rom-com stuff badly turns me off with the way it expects us to treat maladaptive obsession and stalking as cute and romantic in the long run. It’s a common problem in romcoms for sure but it’s surely something the medium shouldn’t be doing in 2022.
October 28, 2024 @ 6:20 am
Power of Three, too, unfolds over a vastly longer time span than your average episode (“the slow invasion”) in a way that feels directly opposite to 42, and the original draft of Cold Blood was for the story to be told Memento-style, as we delve back through Amy’s memories of the events of the story, only for things to fray and fragment as we get closer and closer to the end, as she gets closer and closer to forgetting Rory, with the reveal that the events we were witnessing are her slowly crumbling memories.
That said, I do think Once, Upon Time gets there ahead of Eve in terms of Chib era episodes based on a formal mechanic.
October 28, 2024 @ 8:38 am
I watched the in-order cut of Memento, which is a genuinely interesting illustration of how pacing works. Obviously the plot itself unfolds in a way that’s more direct, but what really damages the movie is how the energy and tone of each scene becomes mismatched from its neighbours. Now that you’ve made the comparison I can also see how some of the weaknesses of Hungry Earth / Cold Blood could have been covered up by a bit of nonlinearity – just in terms of things like the character motivations or the exposition. At least it would also give some reason to it being a two-parter, that could feel more than a single episode stretched out.
October 28, 2024 @ 5:39 pm
“the original draft of Cold Blood was for the story to be told Memento-style, as we delve back through Amy’s memories of the events of the story, only for things to fray and fragment as we get closer and closer to the end, as she gets closer and closer to forgetting Rory, with the reveal that the events we were witnessing are her slowly crumbling memories.” That sounds so good! Damn.
October 29, 2024 @ 8:50 am
My thought exactly. That sounds like a better telling of the story, and as a bonus if the narrator is clearly unreliable you can use head canon to soften or erase “Things That Don’t Make Sense”.
Having said that, I watched Love&Monsters without even considering the possibility of an unreliable narrator. It was only when reading sites like this I developed any awareness of that possibility.
October 28, 2024 @ 6:07 am
“This success arises […] 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.”
I’ve occasionally been suspicious of the “lack of money forces you to be inventive” mantra of various production staff in the past – even when Verity Lambert said it, and who the hell do I think I am to ever doubt her understanding of anything for a microsecond? But, yes, this seems to be a prime example of the benefits that come from working within genuine limits and somehow not screwing up entirely—which was undoubtedly the best we could expect from the Chibnall era. (I’m so relieved to be able to talk about that in the past tense.) It helped he was working with talented people, though.
As several of the essays in “Queers Dig Time Lords” pointed out, many non-straight (perhaps even non-cis) fans of the series – especially during the “classic” series – had to read between the lines to find things which “interested” them. (Well, that’s when the show wasn’t giving us Alpha Centauri, obviously.) Which was pretty much to be expected during 1960s, 1970s and 1980s television. But I’ve always been slightly wary of that tendency to read between the lines, if only because of the risk of going too far: “I love humans. Always seeing patterns in things that aren’t there.”
That’s one reason why I’ve never been a fan of “slash” fiction. (Not just because, if it had been a British phenomenon originally, it would’ve been called “stroke”—which I feel is much more appropriate!) Sadly the few examples I’ve read down the years have struck me as (a) poorly written work primarily by cis women dreaming of two straight men “getting it on” for their own gratification (and, hey, why not?), despite (b) there being absolutely no justification in the original fiction on which to base the “ship”. Mind you, (and I accept, I am basing this on an extremely limited sample) it was also clear that these women had no actual experience of how hot, horny and rough sex between men can actually be.
So, I have to admit to rolling my eyes when I first started to hear chatter about of “Thasmin”—because, frankly, I thought the idea – though genuinely interesting – just wasn’t based on anything actually discernible in the episodes as broadcast. (Doubtless, some people will say I was just not noticing the evidence. Obviously, I think they’re wrong.) So I was, momentarily, genuinely surprised on original viewing that Chibnall had opted to pick up on it and give the idea some legitimacy. (Perhaps he’d simply gone: Oh, that’s a good idea. I’ll nick that!”) And then I was NOT surprised one minute later when, with his typical subtlety, Chibnall shut the idea down and instead opted to give us an utterly meaningless cameo for a one-note character from 2018.
And so, “Thasmin” became yet another ship that had sailed off to the horizon. Ah well…
October 28, 2024 @ 6:10 am
Amusing that the highlight of his era (which isn’t saying much) is the result of a script falling through, a rushed replacement script and lack of budget.
Then you look to the next episode, a special which was seemingly granted to them as an extra, and boy oh boy.
October 28, 2024 @ 7:50 am
“In any case, there is simply nothing to value in your internal fantasies of a fictional character’s smoldering attraction for another fictional character. […] But the fantasies themselves are emotional farts of shower thoughts[, not art].”
Hold up, now — the conclusion doesn’t follow, and twice over! Firstly Spivak was talking about novels, and it’s one thing to extend that to other forms of narrative fiction, but it doesn’t, cannot generalise to all forms of art. A poem, a painting, a mood piece might indeed very much exist for the chief purpose of conveying a vibe, an emotional state, a musing. Some may argue that even then, the fantasies are only the kernel, the speck of grist around which the true pearl is spun — but I dispute that. If we were a species of telepaths, I’d wager that transmitting such abstract visions, hypothetical combinations of feelings with a particular balance of love and longing and repression, would be regarded as an art in itself, and a worthy one.
Which brings to my other point: even accepting that these non-narrative confabulation of vibes aren’t “art” or “fiction” or whatever else you want to prescriptively define, I don’t think it remotely follows that the mental activity is an “emotional fart” devoid of value. It might in fact be a deeply meaningful and admirable pursuit of the human spirit, just one which doesn’t really fall under the category of “art”. Lots of things are. Falling in love for yourself, for one.
October 28, 2024 @ 8:29 am
If we get value out of redemptive readings of art which is perhaps not so well-loved, is there not value in a redemptive reading of ways of appreciating art that we ourselves do not value? Is that not an exercise in empathy worthwhile in its own right?
October 28, 2024 @ 10:38 am
I think empathy is a really interesting word to pick, because it seems to be what this era of Eruditorum is running very short on.
I’ve been told before by Patreon supporters who’ve already seen the full scope of these essays that it’s going somewhere, and I look forward to that. And indeed I suppose my own disappointed reaction is part of the theatre of the thing. But in the meantime, it seems Eruditorum has basically become an exercise in contempt. Contempt for the Who of this period, contempt for other mainstream genre offerings. Contempt that is even expressed through positive treatments of other works, which offer relief from the burden of having to write about Chibnall’s production.
I don’t think it’s unwarranted. I’ve been at pains to point out how viscerally disappointed I was. But it makes for a testing read that in the end makes me feel some sympathy for Chibnall. It’s a venting of spleen so sustained it makes a flagship television production in it’s 15th-odd year with global recognition feels like the under dog!
This may be the point, the ‘where it’s going’. That in feeding the critic such thin gruel, the material leaves the critic malnourished and dyspeptic. But if that’s the thesis, it’s not worth the reading, to me. I don’t believe in it, for one. To be so consumed (for the purposes and narrative of the project, obviously) with the shortcomings of this era of Who that you yourself become as boring and predictable is just mindless fannish obsession. Go elsewhere, read better books, watch better TV. Dismiss Chibnall’s Who with eloquence and brevity as painfully insufficient and tell us where the gold of this period lies. To return, week after week, to something so hateful, to savage it with such performance ultimately reveals nothing but a loss of perspective on the critic’s part.
On top of that, the need to signal contempt for the project of TV Who in this period has spilled over into cruelty to targets who’ve done nothing to deserve it. The haughty dismissal of those who did find something meaningful in the Doctor-Yasmin is a sad and uncomfortable thing to read. We’ve all found meaning and comfort in bits of this show that looks to the outside eye as thin as tissue, and as cheap. What a petty cruelty to denigrate those who see different depth and take different comforts.
I look forward to the curtain lifting on the narrative of this era, even as I’m less and less sure it can deliver a redemptive reading of itself.
October 28, 2024 @ 2:34 pm
I just want to point out that – as El herself has noted – “Go elsewhere, read better books, watch better TV” is not really an option for her because writing about Doctor Who is literally her job.
October 28, 2024 @ 2:40 pm
And I’ll further note: I do and have. Chibnall-era Doctor Who did not, in fact, make up the lion’s share of my artistic consumption from 2018-22, nor of my thought about art. Who I am at work does not make up the whole of my being.
October 28, 2024 @ 3:04 pm
I mean, El, how could it take up the bulk of your viewing when it kept taking a year or so off?
October 28, 2024 @ 3:25 pm
To respond to you and to Sandifer at once: of course! I’m trying to talk about the project of Eruditorum, which has always had a narrative element, always been exploring an argument or creating an effect across multiple entries or a full era of the show. It’s partly why I think it works so well at book length, and why I anticipate those releases with such enthusiasm.
I certainly don’t believe Elizabeth Sandifer the human being spent three or four years solely watching Doctor Who episodes she hated. But I do think Elizabeth Sandifer the semi-constructed author-character in TARDIS Eruditorum is a bit of a tough read in this era, and not wholly likeable, due to the necessity you point out Przemek, and the choices made about how to tackle the critically thin material of this era in the theatre of Eruditorum.
October 30, 2024 @ 5:44 am
Sorry to return to this Przemek, but it’s been dwelling on my mind a bit.
Is that much of a defense of the project? “She had to write angry, thwarted criticism about bad material because she gets paid for it” is the same sort of defense of people who want to be journalists writing for The Daily Mail or people contributing to the slowly obsolescence of the internet by drowning it in a rising tide of SEO focused garbage.
Depending on the person and the skill of the defender it might make me feel sympathy for them and their economic circumstances, but it’s not a defense of the material.
November 2, 2024 @ 11:55 am
Well, Cyrano, as someone who makes a living by adding to the rising tide of SEO focused garbage, you can see how I would be sympathetic to El’s situation. Even if I do my best to make it as non-garbage as I can. Such is life.
Having said that, I wasn’t really trying to defend El’s work here. I personally think the best critical answer to the Chibnall era is to simply stop engaging with it, and our host herself has said as much a few entries back. I just wanted to point out a key bit of real-life context pertinent to the Whittaker Eruditorum. This is not exactly a passion project.
I myself have also found this era of the project hard to read sometimes and I do agree that “Elizabeth Sandifer the semi-constructed author-character” does not come across as particularly sympathetic here. Having read ahead thanks to Patreon, I can only say that it’s definitely intentional and that there is a point to it. Whether the point justifies the exercise – well, that’s something to decide for yourself once we get there. All I can say is that when reading this entry for the first time, some of my feelings were closer to yours than you might think.
(Being one of the people who back El on Patreon, this of course makes me partially responsible for her misery and its influence on the project. So if you want to, you can blame that on me as well. I’m certainly not fully comfortable with that fact.)
October 28, 2024 @ 10:07 am
I feel her argument is less “projecting emotional depth into a work of art as a way of connecting to it isn’t a valid way of engaging with art” but more specifically that “just because you can gain satisfaction by pretending that two characters were queer doesn’t mean that the show itself is actually engaging in queer representation, and that what happens on screen is queer baiting, even if its fanbase are determined to pretend it isn’t”. It’s not that the fantasies of Chibnall fans aren’t important or valid, at least to them, it’s just that they have no bearing on a close analysis of the actual text itself because they’re not an actual part of the text.
October 28, 2024 @ 1:29 pm
I’d like to believe that but it’s hard not to read language like “emotional farts of shower thoughts” as extremely dismissive of such fantasies im general.
October 28, 2024 @ 2:44 pm
Mm. The key distinction, though, is between the fantasies themselves and anything people do with the fantasies. I do not, broadly, think any sexual fantasies are in and of themselves terribly weighty, even as I recognize them as one of the most profound sources of artistic inspiration there is.
October 28, 2024 @ 3:05 pm
Ah… perhaps we were slightly at cross prposes? I wasn’t reading “fantasies” as “sexual fantasies”. I wasn’t talking, nor did I take you to be talking, about people who write Thasmin lemons on ArchiveOfOurOwn — or who do the equivalent in their own heads while their hands are otherwise occupied, as the case may be. I took the conversation to be primarily about the people who make gifsets, the people who like to listen to sad songs while picturing Yaz and the Doctor on that darn beach. I think there’s something genuinely beautiful in that kind of sentiment, even if it’s not a “something” that’s meaningfully creditable to Chibnall. (And even though it wouldn’t suffice to make a good story even if it were his own invention.)
Thasmin doesn’t capture my heart, but, say, listening to the Heaven Sent/Hell Bent soundtrack while generally thinking about the Clara-Doctor emotional turmoil, in an atemporal, vibes-only sort of way, while staring off into space — that does ‘get’ me. I don’t think there’s anything lightweight or superficial about the state of mind it represents, and if Thasminners manage to reach such a state of contemplation without a formally excellent hour of television to get them going, I’m inclined to admire, not demean. …At least, just so long as they don’t conclude that Chibnall must therefore be a good writer.
October 29, 2024 @ 2:28 pm
The intent surely isn’t to suggest “shipping is generally assumable to be horny”, yes? I mean, is it??? Is that what we’ve been talking about always? Somehow I don’t think that’s the aspect that Thasmin types are most concerned with.
Sexuality is such an intensely personal thing that I feel like I often come up against flippant comments that reframe an otherwise non-sexual conversation as having assumed to be primarily sexual in nature the whole time. I don’t know what the right reaction to that is.
October 28, 2024 @ 10:00 am
This is the one that I didn’t even bother to watch. You make me think that perhaps I should. Maybe. Someday.
October 28, 2024 @ 10:07 am
Refreshing to see such a straightforward explanation as to why Thasmin doesn’t work, and especially as to why the Thassies exist in the first place – “that a lot of the people who really loved the Chibnall era are people who like to project their own emotions and depth onto the media they consume.” The Chinball era is so vacuous in having any coherent theme or emotional character to itself that this is basically the only way it even makes sense to me that there are passionate fans of the era in the first place. I’m not even opposed to the idea of Thasmin in the first place. I’m the kind of lesbian that reads lesbianism into almost anything I can, to the point that I’m one of those fans who will look at 12Clara and happily declare it to be yuri. But Thasmin at it exists on screen, as a last second addition designed to go nowhere and created solely to appease a section fandom that confidently mistook chemistry between Mandip and Jodie in behind the scenes videos as real on-screen romantic tension between their characters, is insulting to me. That Chibnall thought these queerbaiting crumbs was good enough representation – hell, good enough character drama – is annoying enough. That so many other queer fans praised it so much is just disappointing to me.
October 28, 2024 @ 12:04 pm
Oh, I liked your video on the subject a lot! (Assuming you’re that Audrey)
October 28, 2024 @ 5:25 pm
Im not unfortunately but I seriously could put together a video of my Thasmin thoughts if I wanted 😭 there’s a lot
October 28, 2024 @ 7:50 pm
I think the single biggest motivator for fans who like Chib Who is simply that they are Doctor Who fans trying to like Doctor Who. All the projection of depth onto the show is a coping mechanism for when the show itself is so crap they can’t like it as it is.
November 2, 2024 @ 12:15 pm
Unfortunately I think this reading is way too charitable. Some people do genuinely love the Chibnall era. This crap is what they actually enjoy. This is the kind of media they like, sad as it is. They’re not coping, they’re simply content.
October 28, 2024 @ 10:33 am
Given as little as he did with it, I think Chibnall would have been better off leaving it to fan-fiction to deal with the relationship.
But the thing that baffles me was that he didn’t even anticipate such a development. When the cast whittled down to the Doctor and Yaz, I’d assumed it at least might hint at the notion. Instead, he throws Dan into the mix and muddles the whole thing.
October 28, 2024 @ 5:27 pm
I can’t help but love the implication in this episode that had Dan not existed to prompt this eleventh hour Thasmin drama into being, then we’d have gotten a 13/Yaz only TARDIS duo run of the show in which they were both too passive to even have THIS much drama.
October 28, 2024 @ 5:48 pm
Was the original plan to have Jack join during Series 13, before the whole pandemic happened, or am I muddying memories? It feels like we were always going to get another companion regardless, whether it be Jack or Graham 2.0 or Dan. What a shame, however, because 13/Yaz could’ve been a unique partnership in the whole show. Two women, and men only in secondary roles (akin to Vinder, etc). But alas, they probably wouldn’t have done much with it.
It’s also quite funny to think that Covid made it so they had to scrap Series 13 (or whatever thoughts of it there were) and they instead made Flux… which required them to keep Yaz and 13 apart for as much as possible, in case Jodie or Mandip caught Covid and had to isolate. So not only is Thasmin a last minute tack-on, but a major storyline in their time spent travelling together has them seperated for years (don’t Yaz and co. spend months if not years away during one of the Flux episodes?)
November 27, 2024 @ 6:42 pm
Yaz and Dan know each other longer than Yaz and The Doctor, yes. It was either 6 or 8 years apart total, might be adding a few from Series 11 and 12 into that one.
October 28, 2024 @ 10:56 am
re. Hartnell ships, I see One/Steven quite a bit.
October 28, 2024 @ 12:20 pm
You’ve said more than once that you don’t value the concept of “fun” and that you reject defenses of bad/mediocre art that amounts to declaring such works “empty fun”. While I don’t share the general sentiment, I find this particular thread of the Whittaker Eruditorum quite compelling. By connecting the vapid emptiness of the Chibnall era to the wider cultural landscape it exists in, you’ve demonstrated just how widespread the “AI sludge” approach to media and storytelling is these days.
Thasmin fans projecting their own fantasies onto the empty signifiers of Doctor and Yaz are the perfect fit for an era of DW that seems perfectly willing to disappear up its own ass, to just be colourful content without meaning or even “aboutness” but with just enough fannish stuff in it to tickle the fan brain and keep people watching. (And ultimately it couldn’t even achieve that.)
October 28, 2024 @ 1:14 pm
It belatedly occurs to me that of course The Timeless Child is a representative of a different strand of fanfic – the lore fix-up fanfic where writers get to air their pet theories about canon.
One can only wonder how Chibnall must have felt, after the fandom largely rejected his own fanfic, finding himself in the position of basically adapting someone else’s fanfic.
October 28, 2024 @ 1:22 pm
The only good thing the Chibnall era had going for it was Thasmin and he had to butt in and ruin it at the last minute, goddamn fucking evil bald man
October 28, 2024 @ 7:42 pm
The attitude of fans of the Chibnall era really reminds me of something you said for the Eruditorum entry for Mawdryn Undead: “I think that the ‘there’s so much depth to what’s implied’ defense really amounts to ‘but if we imply it we don’t actually have to deal with the consequences of saying it out loud and confronting it’.”
Chib fans seem to love the vacancy of his era, because they can imagine there are really deep things that are implied without the text inconveniently giving them a contradictory depiction to what exists in their brains. No need to worry about the starkly drawn conclusions of characters like Clara, River or Rose, it’s just flat, lifeless puppets they can manipulate into doing whatever fan-ficcy things they want in the privacy of their own minds.
My attitude is that this makes for a shit television, and I don’t give a fuck if you can imagine a shadow version that’s actually good.
October 28, 2024 @ 8:47 pm
“The fact that Chibnall apparently viewed this as so complex he needed to break out the whiteboards to keep track of it all it is faintly baffling—you don’t figure Moffat was whiteboarding The Big Bang, y’know?”
No need to diss proper planning. Moffat admitted to making diagrams for Heaven Sent and that’s a simple time loop we barely see onscreen.
October 29, 2024 @ 7:16 am
Just to underline a point I made earlier that’s nested down in some replies to replies. It feels a little cruel of Eruditorum to mock fans for projecting emotional depth onto this era of the show, when this whole project is one of projecting depth and purpose onto a show that’s ultimately not a cohesive project and has had no purpose other than to maintain minute to minute and week to week attention across a diverse and weird collection of writers, producers and actors.
And let me be clear: that’s not a criticism of this Eruditorum. It’s a great project. It’s fascinating and illuminating and cuts a unique and interesting path through the history of Doctor Who specifically and cultural history in general. But you surely can’t look at the entry on the Three Doctors and tell me using it to support a creative essay on William Blake is less justified than having soft, romantic feelings towards the Doctor and Yasmin.
October 29, 2024 @ 10:21 am
okay but even if we grant The Three Doctors is equally as deserving of emotional engagement as the Chibnall era, engaging with it resulted in a cool essay. where is the great work of art/criticism that resulted from having tingly Thasmin feelings?
October 29, 2024 @ 12:02 pm
No idea. Maybe there’s some.
My point wasn’t to institute an economy of Great Works Resulting From Doctor Who Episodes and a scoring system where you can judge whether your deep, unsupported reading into a ropy Doctor Who episode is ultimately worth it. It was to point out that in terms of seeing deeply personal stuff in this series, we’re all standing in a pretty fragile glass house and maybe a little compassion is a better choice than casual cruelty?
October 29, 2024 @ 5:32 pm
i really feel like i’m gonna have to theorise the struggle between the Critic and the Fan(atic) one of these days, but needless to say i’m pretty firmly on the side of the critic
October 30, 2024 @ 5:40 am
I think it’s maybe a bit of a vain distinction sometimes.
October 29, 2024 @ 12:52 pm
Perhaps there is one! I’ve certainly not read the AO3 tag.
But, crucially, I don’t think The Three Doctors is a better episode of television for having a vaguely Blake-like mask on Omega and some gnostic vibes that fit with his mythology. Nor do I think it’s a better episode for having “This Point of Singularity” written about it. Criticism and fan fiction do not have any impact on the quality of the thing they respond to. Nor, frankly, does the quality of a piece of media dictate the quality of responses to it. Great criticism has been written about good art, and great criticism has been written about bad art.
Anyway. In a week and a half I finish putting my cards on the table regarding what I have to say about the Chibnall era. I look forward to finding out what Cyrano thinks then.
October 29, 2024 @ 8:34 am
Hate to be That Guy but we all know I fucking am – Ladbaby feat. Elton John & Ed Sheeran’s “Merry Christmas” was in fact a Ladbaby record.
October 29, 2024 @ 4:55 pm
One reason architectural ruins and liminal spaces are fascinating to people is because structure devoid of meaning or function invites us to fill the void with our own projections. We fill it with ghosts and fantasies. The same can be true of the ruins of narrative structures. It’s easier to project shipping into their void.
You’ve often said that there can be found near the end of an era a limiting episode that tells us how far an approach can go, where its successes become failure. Perhaps this story is the other way around. The ruin near the limit of the Chibnall landscape where its failures can be seen as something closer to success.
October 29, 2024 @ 9:54 pm
That’s very possible. The remains of Ozymandias’ empire are infamously sparse, but there’s something there for you if you’re into feet.
October 29, 2024 @ 6:38 pm
I wish, just once, the Doctor would sit down with a companion and have an honest conversation about having a relationship. Even if that comes while running from Daleks or somesuch. This moony-eyed shit was fine when Ten was recovering from Time War trauma, but if the Doctor isn’t going to be aromantic (a ship that sailed as soon as the TV movie came out), I’d like them to at least try to give them some character depth. I don’t think that’s asking for too much; relationships
That said, even 13, who was so poorly written it was almost satirical, made me understand the Tennant fangirls. Although I’d stopped watching after The Timeless Children, reading about how poorly this was handled made me feel–completely irrationally–resentful. Het women got their escapist fantasy–with multiple characters–but we don’t? I’d even have been happy with a dude (besides Ryan) with the Doctor. Just something where this Doctor is presented as a romantic hero.
October 31, 2024 @ 11:05 am
I commented on the patreon post saying how I think this might be about the best the Chibnall era ever got, so I’ll switch gears here.
After my passionate patron defense, I went back to rewatch it (the first time I’ve rewatched any Whittaker story, I think) and… My god, “the best the Chibnall era ever got” is still not actually very good. There’s lines which just don’t quite hang together, the time loop itself doesn’t really make sense, the ideas that could work need some VERY generous readings. I think the saddest thing for me was there’s actually some decent, Doctorish lines that Whittaker just completely bungles – I know “the writing didn’t give her a chance to shine” is a fairly common idea in fandom, but actually I think she might have shone as much as she could, writing or not.
Aisling Bea is still an absolute delight though, and carries the whole thing.
November 1, 2024 @ 6:14 am
Ooh, what do you consider to be the Doctory lines JW bungled? Might go back to check, as I also think the ‘writing let her down’ argument is kind of BS.
November 1, 2024 @ 4:40 pm
There was a moment right at the start that really made me tune into it – when they’re resetting the TARDIS, and the Doctor says something about getting out in 7 seconds or they’ll all be dead. I could distinctly imagine basically any Doctor doing it really offhandedly and as the comedic beat it obviously is – Whittaker plays it completely straight. There’s also a fairly long scene which basically amounts to “you’ve got to trust me, I’m the Doctor” – it’s not well written, but I really do think she makes basically every wrong turn along the way to make it worse. She plays it so angry and it’s just so so unconvincing. There’s a few other bits later on, but they’re the two that stuck out.
Subjectivity, opinions, etc etc, I just couldn’t get the idea out of my head of watching Matt Smith’s angels two parter and there being a few moments that you can kind of see that it’s the first episode he filmed… Except it’s a lot worse, it’s three seasons in, and it’s on what should be some really really easy decisions.
November 1, 2024 @ 6:38 pm
I’ve got to agree, she never convinced me as the Doctor and I don’t think it was just the material. For me particularly early in her run there were a lot of scenes where a line that , say, Tom Baker would have delivered as the Doctor working something out that she delivered as “I haven’t got a clue what’s going on” . It also felt often that she was pitching the performance at a younger audience than previous Doctors. I could be wrong , but that’s how it felt through more or less throughout her run.
November 1, 2024 @ 10:39 pm
Gonna second this discussion. Most Doctors get some funky lines, but most of the actors who have played the Doctor have pulled some gravitas some pure corny lines or speeches. In Capaldi’s second episode, he was forced to stand in front of a greenscreen and deliver a crappy monologue that makes no sense on the page and less sense spoken aloud. He gets close to making it almost-kinda-sorta work, and that says something about his approach to the role.
On the other hand, whenever given the chance to have gravitas, even material that isn’t crappy, Whitaker more or less bums it (subjective obviously). Her performance is perpetually reserved, and not just in response to the lukewarm writing. She is a mumblecore Doctor. Her conversations with herself are delivered like a real life person having a conversation with themselves, trailing off and mumbling, which is simply a bonkers decision for most of her episodes, especially since Chibnall very regularly has her monologuing to herself. Even Whitaker’s more assertive lines (e.g “Sometimes its not a flat team structure…”) are delivered in a weirdly reserved way that comes across positively unassertive.
Giving some of her same scripts to any of the other NuWho doctors or Sacha Dhawan or Jo Martin would be a really interesting experience, because I get the feeling they would absolutely transform some of the writing into something almost watchable. Obviously it would still be crap, but like, it would be a lot more solid.
None of this is to say she’s a generally bad actor—I think she’s pretty good in most things I’ve seen her in. She plays realistic people pretty well. But the Doctor is often a cartoon character with insane charisma and elocution rather than a real person, and she plays the Doctor like an ordinary sorta zoned-out-of-it person. It’s imo, an ill-advised decision. The mumbling I’m complaining about here is probably just a result of her playing the Doctor like a more ordinary person from a prestige drama rather than the theatrical character the Doctor is.
November 2, 2024 @ 12:07 am
WeslePryce, I think you’ve made the best argument I’ve seen for reconciling Whittaker’s general talent as an actor with her general failure as the Doctor specifically.
November 2, 2024 @ 4:27 pm
@WeslePryce:
Yeah, that’s a wonderful analysis. Now I’m thinking about how a production that actually leaned into that would have worked… Maybe like bits of series 11? I actually love that in her performance, but it doesn’t really fit with the hollowed-out flat sci-fi worlds, because there’s very little meaningful for this kind of character to react to. It’s all just stuff. Let the characters have arguments over breakfast or something, that’d be great…
November 2, 2024 @ 6:10 pm
So to consider how Whittaker got into this spot… apparently she didn’t really know much about Doctor Who before being cast, which is no great problem in itself – Matt Smith had to go back and do some research on the classic show to arrive at his characterisation of the Doctor (and to my mind he works the best whenever he touches on that Troughton-conforting-Victoria-in-Tomb anchor he identified).
However… the rumour I have heard is that Chris Chibnall actively discouraged her from watching prior Doctor Who material, because he wanted her to arrive at a wholly original interpretation of the character not burdened by baggage from prior incarnations. Jodie complying with that request is, again, not something she can really be blamed for – Chibnall is someone she’d worked with previously on Broadchurch, which was a big success for both of them, so I think it’s fair to say that whatever we feel about him now, at the start of the process Chibnall had most likely earned Whittaker’s trust, and putting that much faith in his creative vision was not a problem she could be expected to have spotted ahead of time.
That said… if it is true that Chris asked Jodie not to do that, it’s a very very silly thing for him to ask her to do, because even though she wasn’t performing with mental images of Pertwee or Troughton or Bakers or Smith or whoever in her head, he was bloody well writing with that mental baggage inside his skull. All of that Doctor-y stuff that Chibnall writes and this thread identifies Whittaker as stumbling over is, indeed, stuff which you can imagine a swathe of prior Doctors tackling better than Whittaker, but that’s because Chibnall is making a stab at writing Doctor-y dialogue based on his own sense of what is Doctor-ish, and it doesn’t matter how much he consciously tries to pretend he’s never seen Spearhead From Space or The Deadly Assassin or Human Nature (or, for that matter, Terror of the Zygons), the fact remains that he has and that’s going to bleed in one way or another. As a writer, if you’re not exerting an iron will to drive out anything which reminds you of your major influences, they’re going to creep in regardless, and if you do exert that mental energy then they’re still influencing your work, they’re just doing it by creating a negative space where all the stuff you’re trying to avoid resides.
The only way not to be influenced by something is to never observe it to begin with – if Chibnall asked Whittaker not to watch the prior Doctors, that’s something he must understand on some level. But he wasn’t able to apply that idea to himself, and that’s where we get into the situation where he’s writing classically Doctor-y lines and presenting them to an actor who doesn’t have the toolkit to offer a Doctor-y delivery, because if this rumour is true he has specifically told her not to develop that toolkit.
I don’t know if the rumour is true. But I do note that to me, Whittaker is the most Doctor-ish in It Takes You Away, one of the few Chibnall-era episodes which doesn’t have his stamp on the script. It’s also, unless I have heard wrong, the first episode she actually filmed, which meant there’s the hilarious and awful possibility that she turned in her best performance as the Doctor there and then someone, somehow, encouraged her to shift her performance in a way which made it actively worse.
Or it could be this is all copium to support the “Whittaker just needed new scripts” theory and she really is a prestige TV actor who got badly miscast. It’ll be interesting to see (well, hear) how she does in the Big Finish audios that are coming up, both because it’ll be a chance for her to play the character outside of Chibnall’s creative control and because even if she did keep up that embargo during her tenure on TV, I’ll be willing to bet she broke it once Power of the Doctor wrapped.
November 2, 2024 @ 8:24 pm
To follow up and respond to Arthur: I do think Chibnall severely misdirected Whitaker in the leadup to her run. Every prior NuWho Doctor besides Smith (who watched a bunch of classic who and took inspiration from Troughton) had a prior role that heavily informed their approach to the role (Second Coming for Eccelston, Casanova for Tennant, Tucker for Capaldi lmao). And on top of this, the actors tended to take heavy inspiration from prior Doctor actors—there are times Capaldi outright does a Baker impression (exception: Eccelston thought the prior doctors were snobby and annoying). On the other hand, Whitaker came in with like a procedural cop show and was specifically instructed to not to watch old episodes by Chibnall. The end result is she took a very tame and mellow prestige-TV approach to an already underwritten character. I think she was screwed from the beginning, and also didn’t seem to want to go for anything big, hoping the era would end up alright.
I also tend to believe “Whitaker was misdirected and given terrible scripts,” but it’s worth noting that her attempts to convert the mediocre material rarely end up impressive, and she gets sorta mogged by Sacha Dwahan and Jo Martin who have arguably worse writing but try to be interesting with it.
November 3, 2024 @ 9:38 am
So the thing about Sacha and Jo is that firstly, they both show up in Series 12, a period when Chibnall is pivoting away from the Series 11 approach (where old foes and continuity was largely set aside), so they may have been coming in at a point where Chibnall was a bit more open to actors taking inspiration from earlier eras of the show when it came to performing character harking back to those eras. (OK, the Fugitive Doctor leapfrogs those eras in-character, but from an out of character perspective her TARDIS interior screams classic show.) Conversely, Jodie had a season’s worth of characterisation under her belt already and I don’t think pivoting would have helped.
Which is the other issue with those Doctor-y lines identified in Eve of the Daleks – they’re examples of Chibnall writing in a way which clashes with the way Jodie has played the character for three seasons. Maybe it is actor malpractice to keep trying to play the character in a way that hasn’t landed for so long, but it’s certainly writing malpractice not to adapt at least somewhat to what the actor is doing at this point.
I am left feeling that Jodie’s performance is a much better fit for Series 11 than what came after, because that’s the season which tried to commit the most to that prestige TV approach. (To the extent that it did, that is. This worked the best in the historicals, It Takes You Way, and individual scenes in other episodes, but it collapsed at the Battle of Reet Petite.) But Chibnall changing direction should have prompted a character rethink for 13, like how Smith had a bit of a character recalibration midway through Series 7 (though to my mind that was a change for the worse) or Hartnell pivoted his performance as the role of the Doctor in the show evolved. Hard to say whether the blame lies with Jodie for not proactively attempting it herself or Chibnall for not sitting down with her and explaining the new direction and workshopping how to adapt.
November 3, 2024 @ 10:52 am
So, this is a perfectly decent essay; it’s balanced and well written, and divides its attentions sensibly between an honest appraisal of what it means to call something ‘qualitatively good for the Chibnall Era’ – not just ‘I don’t hate this one’ or ‘this has the promise of a passable script early in a complicated run’, but (locally) decent – and then, when this is very thin gruel for critical reflection, foregrounding discussion of Thasmin as a material and imagined phenomenon. All good stuff.
My only objection, really, is that it’s incredibly charitable toward the actual episode. I see why – even this level of ‘redemptive’ reading has drawn skepticism from some commenters for the trying nature of the current run of essays, a long weary stretch of hopelessness (however much formalistic conceits keep it lively, and the occasional boiling points of rage provide catharsis), there’s some necessity to praising what there is to be praised for the sake of overall morale. Even, and perhaps especially, as this is Not A Review Blog.
And, sure, this episode has Daleks, it has a conceit of any kind, and it has one very decent bit of casting that rescues a huge amount of the character focus… These are rare treats to be sure, but for my part they simply cannot lift this mess into the same lower stratosphere of ‘the good Chibnall scripts’ that it seems to occupy for others, nor even the enjoyable bad ones (Tsuranga and THA being easy personal picks on that front) – let alone ‘the best episode of his tenure’. I’m sorry, but no. This is a romcom that promotes deeply unhealthy and frankly dangerous cultural standards, inside a time loop that doesn’t goddamn loop.
First things first, romcoms are a genre immensely defined by male authorship, nice guy(tm) logic, and fundamentally the idea of earning love as a reward for ethical behaviour, or more often basic self-work. These underpinnings are incredibly hard to unpick from the genre, and many of the best examples aren’t even attempting to, so much as burying them under sufficient other entertainment or social value as to simply not be the takeaway. The Lodger, despite its authorship, is a charming little love story, but it can hardly escape being the tale of a woman on the verge of escaping cultural hetronormativity and making something of her life who is ultimately drawn into the orbit of a definitionally uninspiring and generic man who wants nothing much from being alive bar comfort and her attention (to pick the insularly Whoish example for comparison). But most modern romantic comedies at least seem to be in some dialogue with the grounds for critique one can level at the genre, at least seem to be working against it. Eve of the Daleks, by all contrast, scans most comprehensibly as a pitch black comedy about a woman who is gaslit by a shared traumatic experience into surrendering to the affections of a stalker who is going to murder her. And it’s not even funny. I can only assume this was unintentional as the spectre of Chibnall The Arch Cynic is e’re too inconsistant a figure to credit with concious design, when Chibnall The Inept Mild Misathrope is so available. But how one can be so shortsighted as to not see the sum of the parts here is beyond me, and in any case authorial intent be damned, this is a nasty little story however much the man who penned it almost certainly imagined he was spinning a heartwarming yarn. It’s casually sexist in its romantic instincts even if we very generously take all of the reddest flags strewn about the place to be unsettling but incidental (great advice to be promiting, obviously). the oddities of a quirky fellow. Nothing to worry about, I’m sure.
And yes, much as I stand with El in being more cross about TTC then Thasmin, I confess that despite the above I’m more angry at the bloody time loop than I am the fact that Nick is clearly a creep and likely an axe murderer (or a tech millionair, the other easiest reading for why he’s like this is to look at him a Musk or Zuck figure). Not least, I’m cross because this is held up as part of the case for the episode. People generally admit the optics of the romance are uncomfortable, but even our host patted the story’s back for being willing to do formalism… but, I mean, bust out a whiteboard and try mapping the events of the story. Logically. Really give it a go, because if I have to take that claim at face value it is some of the most damning autocritique Chibnall has ever provided, not just that he needed that level of planning for a relatively basic premise, at the end of the day as someone says upthread we needn’t shame anyone for watever it takes to map their plots, especially if there’s anything convoluted in the mix… but that he went to such lengths and still utterly failed to create a working model.
Time is looping. The time loop ends at midnight. There are Daleks going about shooting people. The time loop is getting shorter. But it has to end at midnight, symbolically, so we’re not losing time from the end. Indeed, near the start of the episode, this is demonstrated, with one or maybe even two of the initial loops resetting the characters to a prior point in the episode which is further along than the last time they reset. So, we’re losing time from the beginning of the loop, yes? Clocks seem to confirm this variously also, and Aisling Bea’s mum calls at the same time every loop. So every time the characters die, or the timer reaches zero, we jump back to a later point than we did last time, with some of the events from the start of the last loop having now stuck, right? Every minute counts and the first few minutes of any loop count double, right? If you die in the Matrix you die in real life… right?
No, of course not, Chris Chibnall is an incomprehensible hack. After the first loop or two every reset just takes the characters back to the same start point location as last time, for no clear reason, and they get to make a completely fresh set of decisions with no consequences from the previous iteration. At various points characters are gunned down immediatly after respawning and that doesn’t get saved to the stacking chain of events. There is no stacking chain of events, just video game logic with a limited number of lives being dishonestly branded as a formalist temporal conceit. I mean they’re, what, losing time from the middle somehow?
And, fuck it, I’m not even saying ‘losing time from the middle’ is an unworkably bad idea, it’s giving up on formalism, let alone any kind of scifi harness, but so what? This is Doctor Who, and needs must when the Devil drives. If you want to use video game logic to get some character death spectacle out of your incredibly low budget seasonal special that’s entirely valid, if you’d rather dress that up in Inspector SpaceTime level temporal physics more power to you, it’s not like The Edge of Destruction actually made sense or anything. But be honest, for gods sakes, admit that’s how the mechanic works and lampshade how silly it is, don’t just paint a salad brown and call it steak. And it baffles me that response at large to this episode, which has fun moments and and a premise, and one working character, while generally tepid in its enthusiasm, is often with the caveat ‘nice to see Chibnall at least serving steak for a change’.