TARDIS Eruditorum

It’s January 12^th, 2020. Stormzy, Ed Sheeran, and Burna Boy are at number one with “Own It,” while Lewis Capaldi, Dua Lipa, Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, and The Weeknd also chart. The family has been busy—we’d spent the late fall looking for a place to rent for all four of us, and in the early weeks of 2020 secure it and work on signing a lease, with a move-in date at the beginning of April. Life’s a busy blur of social engagements and planning, and Doctor Who is little more than my career obligation—the thing I have to find space on Sundays to deal with. In this case, it happens at Skulls, where the only television space involves us pulling kitchen chairs into a small bedroom if we want to get four people to watch it. We do so this week. Nobody enjoys it.

And of course, why should they? To say that this episode appears to have production problems is an understatement. It’s the ultimate “Chaos in Cardiff” production, such a self-evident shambles that they blatantly did not actually have the monster costumes on set for the bulk of it, having to shoot the bulk of confrontations with them as a shot-reverse-shot with the reverse just being a flash of a couple of them hissing in a dark room. It’s embarrassing like Underworld or Timelash is embarrassing—a colossal basic failure of television production. Which is, of course, no surprise. Like we said, last week all meaning collapsed as the show simply went into a long term nervous breakdown. 

This week, then, it’s not even much of a surprise when time itself breaks. That is, ultimately, the only way to understand this episode. The fact that this cannot easily be reconciled with The Mysterious Planet (an episode that, being a corrupted Matrix visualization, arguably has no inherent continuity implications in the first place) is easy enough to get around given that the Doctor explicitly declares this to only be one possible future. The problem is just that, well, the Doctor explicitly declares this to only be one possible future.

It’s not, obviously, that the idea of possible futures is new to Doctor Who. Time can famously be rewritten, and Kill the Moon explicitly introduced the idea that seemingly major events in history and future history were explicitly unfixed points. Nevertheless, the idea that there is a relatively singular timeline has clearly been the default. There are multiple instances in which the TARDIS has repeatedly visited broadly coherent notions of the future, including instances that span vast stretches of the Doctor’s subjective timeline. Put simply, if the sort of relationship with the future that Orphan 55 is suggesting were in play, it would be much more remarkable that the Doctor should encounter Alpha Centauri in both The Curse of Peladon and The Empress of Mars than the Doctor ever suggests. The timeline clearly has comparatively malleable bits, and you can certainly argue that it’s undergone massive revision over time, but there’s still generally supposed to be one of it.…

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It’s January 1st, 2020. Ellie Goulding is at number one with “River,” and the charts are otherwise hilariously unchanged from the last ones we talked about. In the year since Resolution, it’s been a pretty sizable upheaval in my life. A few days after it aired, I drove down to Virginia to pick up a reader of mine who rather direly needed to escape her abusive home and helped her transfer to the community college outside of Ithaca where I was working. By the time the Chibnall era is over, I’ll have adopted her. 

A few months later, after a particularly nice visit to see my boyfriend Penn in Boston, he and his wife Anna decided to move to Ithaca and form a four person poly family with my then-wife. They moved down at the beginning of July, by which point I’d decided to quit my community college job on the back of a successful push to increase my Patreon funding so that I can afford to go back to writing full time. This began a period in which I am effectively living in two houses, split between the apartment my then-wife and I already had, called within the polycule the Cave of Skulls, and the one that Anna and Penn are renting, called Tree House. 

New Year’s Eve is spent at a pleasant if last minute party at a friend’s house that, in hindsight, will turn out to be the last real time the stable social circle that I’d enjoyed for a few years in Ithaca all hung out. Waking up the next day, the big question looming over my New Year’s Day is the fact that there’s a new Doctor Who to watch, and more to the point the fact that my Patreon is currently below the admittedly ambitious threshold I set to review it.

I’ve made a New Year’s Resolution to watch a hundred movies in 2020—I fail—but I get started with Knives Out at the local Regal in the dying mall, and it’s as we’re heading into the theater that I get the ping that my Patreon has gone high enough at the last minute, I’ll have to actually watch and review/podcast about Spyfall Part 1 when I get home. So we head back to Trees, pull up the new episode, and I have a look.

Let’s start with the first, oh, nine minutes or so, because they’re actually pretty good. We get a nice, tight cold open of some monster kills that bustles with all the international sweep that slapping location captions over stock footage and shots of Cardiff can muster. Then we have credits, and, in a nice cheeky bit of flag planting, an identical caption for Sheffield that puts it on the same level as the locations we’d been touring a minute before. Here we get a quick reintroduction to the core cast, doing an efficient “how their lives have changed traveling with the Doctor” sequence for each before having them picked up by mysterious men in black, as, finally, is the Doctor.…

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For once, then, the spinoff media feel like a plausible hope of quality. Of course, they exited the Moffat era in dire shape. Big Finish’s failures scarcely neet further elaboration, while the novel line spent a decade in gradual decline under the stewardship of the same guy who’d been editor for The Ancestor Cell. This meant that we were never going to see some Whittaker Era in Exile that offered a credible double to the main era. But it didn’t preclude outbreaks of quality. This was, after all, the line that had previously hired Michael Moorcock and Stephen Baxter. Good things could still happen.

And certainly the hiring of Juno Dawson qualifies. A successful young adult writer who penned This Book is Gay to the outrage of the good homophobes of Wasilla, Alaska before publicly transitioning. She is, in other words, the sort of author you’d actually expect a healthy Doctor Who novels line to commission: a reasonably hot writer who’s a big enough fan to be amused by the opportunity. (Dawson offers fond childhood memories of Time and the Rani, which is one of the most delightfully idiosyncratic versions of that anecdote as Doctor Who writers go.) This book was an unequivocal good sign in a year that had plenty of bad ones.

Because quality is an annoyingly foregrounded issue in this era, we may as well establish up front that this is pretty good. Dawson gets how to do this. The Good Doctor sits up there with Demons of the Punjab and, more cursedly, Kerblam! in actually providing a notion of how this could ever have worked. Which is a key piece of work for the long run accomplished. When some idiot in twenty or thirty years decides there’s room to do another big sprawling Doctor Who overview, The Good Doctor will play a key role in establishing the dissident “good” version of the Thirteenth Doctor era that got reconstructed in hindsight.

But that’s going to require hindsight. At the time of writing—early March, 2023 for the first draft of this—the Thirteenth Doctor era still stands out for having the absolute lowest number of decent stories of literally any era of Doctor Who. In part this is because of the dearth of spinoff material—there’s only a handful of other Thirteenth Doctor books besides this one, as once Richards retired from managing the line it largely withered, and so the era is still entirely dependent on the televised version, in much the same way that your only real options for non-televised Colin Baker stories in 1987 were Slipback and the Doctor Who Magazine comic. So while there clearly is a working model of Whittaker’s Doctor to concoct out of this, that doesn’t at present actually constitute a generally functional Whittaker era in the same way that early Big Finish did for Colin Baker.

So how did Dawson accomplish this? Well, the cynical and not entirely satisfying answer is that she did it by simply inventing the era from scratch.…

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It’s January 1^st, 2019. Ava Max is at number one with “Sweet But Psycho,” with Wham, Mariah Carey, the Pogues featuring Kirsty Maccoll, Band Aid, Michael Buble, Leona Lewis, Elton John, and Shakin’ Stevens all also charting, literally none of them with songs released this decade. (Ariana Grande’s “Thank U Next” is the only other actually contemporary song in the top ten.) In news, Gatwick Airport spent three days closed due to either drone activity or hilarious panic over nothing. The Donald J. Trump Foundation was shut down for, basically, being a massive scam, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned in ineffectual protest, and Theresa May survived a no confidence vote. 

On television, meanwhile, Doctor Who is back with its only episode of 2019, Resolution, which features the mostly unannounced return of the Daleks. The key scene—or at least what should be the key scene—comes with the sequence of Lin assembling the scrap metal Dalek, with its obviously deliberate parallels to the Doctor assembling her sonic screwdriver back in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. Doctor/Dalek parallels are nothing new, of course, but this isn’t historically how they play out. Usually this is something about monstrosity—the Doctor making a good Dalek, as Rob Shearman put it in a formulation that has really only ever been iterated upon in the subsequent twenty years. But that’s not what’s going on here. No, in this instance the Dalek is being compared to the Doctor. After all, it’s Whittaker who has already been established as “the one who makes stuff out of spare parts in Sheffield.” The Dalek is, very literally, imitating her here.

Which, neat. That’s a cool idea. But let’s ask: where is this going? We’ve got a neat visual parallel going, it’s all very compelling, but what exactly is it saying? Because as played out as Shearman’s trick has been (and as “gently nicked from The Killing Joke” as it was), it at least had something to say about the complicated relationship between heroism and monstrosity. It had implications. It contributed towards a larger understanding of the narrative. But what exactly does it mean that the Dalek, like the Doctor, rebuilt itself out of Sheffield steel?

It’s not that there aren’t options here. There’s undoubtedly a story to be told about the Doctor as a scrap metal identity, rebuilt and repurposed. That’s an entirely workable regeneration metaphor, and you could then readily extend it to a new and reworked Daleks by way of playing with the absolute and unchanging nature of the Daleks. There’s something there. There’s also probably something a bit more China Miéville to be done about salvaged identities. And those are, like, just what I can come up with off the top of my head. Fundamentally, it’s a pretty open-ended idea with which you can legitimately do a fair amount.

The problem is just… well, it’s exactly what you’d expect it to be, isn’t it? Chibnall doesn’t do any of these things. I mean, the entire Sheffield Steel angle on the Doctor has been even more fallow than Ryan’s dyspraxia over the preceding nine episodes.…

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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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