TARDIS Eruditorum

Shortly thereafter, everything went to absolute shit. On March 11th, COVID was finally named a pandemic. The same day, Atletico Madrid played Liverpool in the Champions League, prompting a spike of cases in northwest England. A week later it was announced that the schools would close. Two days later, restaurants. Three days after that, on March 23rd, the UK officially entered lockdown.

The big move happened a week later, in the nebulous space of that early pandemic—we were isolating, and everything was shut down, but masks weren’t a thing yet. Those came a few weeks later—at least it feels like weeks. The timeline frankly just sort of collapses into a long haze of lockdown and waiting for the vaccines. I couldn’t really tell you what parts happen when anywhere between that and the election beyond a few individual dates like the disastrous surgery consult in which I learn I am not a candidate for vaginoplasty without significant weight loss. (My wife is with me, as she’s a medical professional and I wanted her there to ask and answer questions. Sitting in the passenger seat sobbing inconsolably, I find that the only thing I actually want is Penn.)

Meanwhile, for what is essentially the only time during the Chibnall era, Doctor Who found itself ahead of the cultural curve. Unsurprisingly, Chibnall had nothing to do with it. Instead credit goes to Emily Cook, then an employee at Doctor Who Magazine but soon to find herself an appreciably bigger deal (she’s now a development executive on Peter Harness’s new series), organized a Twitter-based watchalong of The Day of the Doctor (#SaveTheDay) to take place on March 21st, the day the schools were ordered closed, bringing Steven Moffat out of Twitter retirement to play along. Moffat went so far as to write a short intro sketch akin to Strax’s introduction to the cinema screenings of the episode, for which Dan Starkey gamely filmed a voiceover with a Strax plushie, claiming to have been shrunk by the “Spy Master.” Neve McIntosh contributed a vocal cameo. It was all a lot of fun.

And then it kept going. For two months, Emily Cook corralled various writers and actors onto Twitter for tweetalongs and to create bonus content for a total of nineteen watchalongs. This content found itself getting increasingly elaborate and well-produced. The second watchalong, for Rose (#TripofaLifetime), saw Russell T Davies drop both an abandoned “how Paul McGann regenerated into Christopher Eccleston” bit of prose and a sequel called “Revenge of the Nestene” that sees the Nestene Consciousness take over Boris Johnson. The fourth, for The Eleventh Hour (#FishCustard)  saw Moffat pen a piece called “The Raggedy Doctor, by Amelia Pond,” narrated by Caitlin Blackwood and given full-on original illustrations. By the time of The Doctor’s Wife (#BiggerontheInside) Neil Gaiman was penning an original scene for Arthur Darvill to deliver to camera and it was clear these had obtained a proper critical mass, such that everyone thereafter largely gave their all to the problem “how can we create a two minute extra tied to this episode without any of us leaving our houses?”…

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It’s February 23, 2020. Billie Eilish is at number one with “No Time to Die.” The Weeknd, Lewis Capaldi, and Justin Bieber also chart. In news, Bernie Sanders continues his apparent romp towards the Democratic nomination by winning Nevada, while the plastic £20 note enters circulation. COVID plods along in the background, a slow moving catastrophe that somehow still doesn’t feel real. At Penn and Anna’s, we watch Ascension of the Cybermen, a dutiful but hollow rendition of what you might call standard issue Doctor Who season finale. It’s fine. The ending is stupid and obvious, and the Ireland stuff is weird, but mostly it’s the sort of boringness you expect from the Chibnall era.

A week later The Weeknd is back on top, Biden’s triumphant victory in South Carolina has turned the race on its head, and COVID is just starting to tip into its “cancel everything” phase. We’ve begun the process of packing, and Penn and I watch the season finale. And suddenly, I understand how Jan Vincent-Rudzki felt.

I want to tarry in that space for a minute, because the emotion is so vivid. Doctor Who annoys and disappoints me frequently, and at times I hate it, but this is the first time it has ever made me angry. It’s positively indecorous. I remember going off on a fan on Twitter—one I’d previously gotten on with, and who I think still gets on with Jack and some of the other people around the site—when they make a crowing post in support of the episode that takes time to revel in the misery of Moffat fans. I forget what I say. I’m sure “go fuck yourself” is involved. It may well be worse. Certainly it’s bad enough to be embarrassing. And yet it’s also entirely honest to the raw emotion of the moment. It feels stupid to be this angry about a TV show—even one I’ve tied myself to so completely. But I am.

Really, though, everything about this feels stupid. Three and a half years on, it’s still difficult to quite understand how it happened. No, Chibnall had never been good, but there’s an ocean of distance between Spyfall, which is recognizably doing a bad job at something that at least makes abstract sense to attempt, and The Timeless Children. Here we’re left to try to ascertain just what’s worse—the underlying idea or the execution.

We’ve talked a lot about the basic incompetence of the Chibnall era at this point, and so there’s relatively little new to talk about here. You’ve got Ko Sharmus, whose only real claim to having anything resembling the narrative weight he’s given is that he’s played by a third tier Game of Thrones actor. You’ve got Jo Martin coming back to play Magical Black Lady. And then, of course, you’ve got the fact that the main plot of The Timeless Children is literally the Master tying the Doctor up and explaining his wild new fan theory about the Morbius Doctors to her, a decision that is so comprehensively and stupidly ill-considered that it feels like you’re just being trolled—that this must be some sort of cruel joke Chibnall is unleashing on the world in a fit of Joker-like nihilism and desire to watch it all burn.…

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It’s February 16th, 2020. The Weeknd is at number one with “Blinding Lights.” Dua Lipa, Saint Jhn, and Roddy Ricch also chart. It’s a pleasantly dull week—we watch some movies, I take Penn for one of his periodic botox appointments for his migraines. This whole coronavirus thing gets an official name, COVID-19. There’s news—the New Hampshire primary spells certain doom for Joe Biden, Boris Johnson does a cabinet reshuffle, but mostly it’s just boring and uneventful in ways that feel strangely surreal in hindsight.

I remember we watched Ken Russell’s Gothic as cheeky prep for this episode, which feels almost unbelievable now—imagine caring enough about the Chibnall era to bother doing that. But what was striking then and remains striking now is how pointless an effort that was. I imagine I was hoping it might give something to talk about in the review, as those were becoming increasingly tortured experiences. But of course it didn’t. That would ultimately require the Chibnall era to master aboutness, such that the larger cultural context of its nominal subject might matter to an episode.

That was simply not the world we lived in. Instead… I mean, the Chibnall era always leans a bit “visual Big Finish,” but it applies here in new and strange ways. It’s not even that Big Finish had already done this; it’s actually worse than that—Big Finish had the Doctor being the inspiration for Frankenstein in 2009 as the fourth part of The Company of Friends, then had Mary Shelley join as a companion whose first trip in the TARDIS was a Cybermen story called The Silver Turk. Here, however, as if inspired by that “man eating peas with the idea they will improve virility shovels them straight into his lap” Oblique Strategy, Chibnall just goes straight to “the Cybermen inspire Frankenstein.”

It’s not that Doctor Who has never done “celebrity historical with classic monsters” before, although Victory of the Daleks is hardly your best precedent in life. And it’s certainly does “the secret sci-fi origin of a famous bit of history” countless times. But it had never actually done this—a story in which some bit of history is inspired by an iconic Doctor Who monster. When I reviewed it I snarked about Mary Shelley turning out to have just ripped of Kit Pedler, but that gives it too much credit. This isn’t ripping off a writer who, whatever else might be said about him, at least possessed a unique vision. This is simply the replacement of vision with lore.

Much like that “what if we MCUed the Whoniverse” timeline I talked about back with Star Trek: Discovery, I have an almost violent hatred of this. Perhaps you don’t, but I doubt you’ve stuck around this place as long as you must have if you’re reading the entry on The Haunting of Villa Diodati without at least understandng where I’m coming from. Still, let’s slow down and think that critical judgment through. What exactly is the problem here?…

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It’s February 9th, 2020. The Weeknd is at number one with “Blinding Lights.” Lewis Capaldi, Billie Eilish, and Harry Styles also chart. I’m settling into life back home. My wife recovers from the flu, which we all manage to avoid. Penn and I have sessions on our thigh tattoos, part of a local artist’s project to do a tarot deck in tattoos. He was getting the Sun, me the Devil. My wife had Death and the World. In the background, it becomes clear to anyone who’s watching that this coronavirus situation is going irrevocably out of control as hotspot after hotspot inexorably expands.

The day this airs, I go over to Alex and Meredith’s to run the first and, as it happens, last session of a Changeling the Dreaming game set in Manchester in 1987; Penn plays a gay social worker named Terrence, and the first session cliffhanger is a faerie publicly executing Margaret Thatcher for her failures as a leader. Presumably after we get back I download and watch Can You Hear Me?, about which there simply are not two thousand words worth of things to say.…

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It’s February 2nd, 2020. Peter Capaldi’s second cousin is at number one with “Before You Go.” The Weeknd, Dua Lipa, and Billy Eilish also chart. I, meanwhile, am on a plane back to New York after a whirlwind of a week in which Penn and I galavanted about London. I can’t even remember everything we did—the Tate Modern, the British Museum, Hampton Court, St. Paul’s. Tourist shit. I remember the slow background drip of this news story coming out of China—what looks like a redux of SARS or bird flu. It doesn’t seem very interesting. Brexit happens while we’re there, and like the coronavirus has no tangible impact on the day to day experience of life or place. Our final day there is the canonical best day of my life—the morning is spent at the Tate Britain looking at Blake paintings—we’d briefly seen the exhibition the night before, but only had about an hour in the gallery, so went back and spent the three hours it deserved, successfully blagging our way in for free despite the fact that the exhibit is sold out that day. Then we spend the afternoon and evening with Kieron Gillen, culminating in dinner at a fancy Indian place.

That was also my wife’s birthday. I, obviously, missed it, having planned the trip to coincide with an event at the Tate that was hosted by John Higgs, who was the first critic to cite TARDIS Eruditorum in a book. My wife—also a big fan of Kieron’s, and for that matter of Brian Catling, who was on the panel at the Tate—stayed home, visited her parents, and got the flu. That was her choice—I invited her, and she said she didn’t want to spend the money. But it still happened; I ditched my wife on her birthday to go have the canonical best day of my life with my other partner. I mention this precisely because it makes me look unsympathetic. I‘m not above reproach. Don’t ever think this is the sort of story where I’m above reproach.

Anyway, I finally watch this back in Connecticut. Possibly the next day. I don’t really remember. Like a lot of Doctor Who in this era, it doesn’t make much of an impression on me one way or the other. I’ll tell you who it apparently does make an impression on, though—this fellow named “Tibère” who wrote a big long blog post praising it. Tibère was a pen name for a guy who existed in what might dispassionately be called leftist Doctor Who fandom and more egotistically called the greater orbit of my work. They ran a site called Downtime where a ton of my more engaged readers were routinely doing some phenomenal stuff, and published a book on the Whittaker era with longtime friend of the blog James Wylder’s Arcbeatle Press. To the extent that I knew them they seemed a decent enough sort, but I couldn’t honestly say they’d made more of an impression on me than “the gay French one who was doing a podcast with my daughter,” at least until it emerged that they’d been emotionally abusing and sexually harassing a ton of people, my daughter included.…

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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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