TARDIS Eruditorum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It’s October 14th, 2018. Dave and Fredo are at number one with “Funky Friday.” Calvin Harris and Sam Smith, Kanye West and Lil Pump, Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, and Rita Ora also chart. In news, the IPCC released one of its many reports urgently warning about the disastrous effects of climate change, which is roundly ignored by the major governments of the world. Canada legalized cannabis. Massive flooding takes place in Wales following Storm Callum, and American ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley abruptly resigns.

Meanwhile, on television, the Chibnall era burns through its honeymoon. Were we in the business of reviews—and indeed this is what I did at the time—we might note that second episode are often a little rough, select some bright points, and decide to look forward to Rosa before making our minds up. But that would be postponing the inevitable and we all know it. The Ghost Monument is a bad piece of television. It is bad in ways that most of what Chibnall writes for this show are going to be bad. So we may as well spell that out clearly, get our cards on the table, and start figuring out what we’re going to do to talk about this mess of an era.

Let’s begin with the most basic structural problem. We have a cast of four, two of which have had virtually no introduction, two more of whom are still scant in many ways. And so in their second outing, the priority is surely to give Yaz and Ryan some characterization. Instead of this, Chibnall introduces Angstrom and Epzo, who effectively serve as one-off companions, and thus heavily clog up the characterization for the main team, forcing the script to deal with a six person ensemble for most of its runtime.

There is, of course, an obvious fix for this available, which is to split the action between two camps. Indeed, that’s what the story does in the opening minutes, putting the Doctor and Yaz on Epzo’s ship and Graham and Ryan on Angstrom’s. This would make a lot of sense given that the plot of the story concerns a race, a dynamic that generally relies on, you know, different competitors moving at different speeds as opposed to a homogenous group that sticks together the whole time. To be clear, Chibnall’s approach here isn’t a complete headscratcher—his end theme is the importance of cooperation, and so he has the characters cooperating throughout. But the result is that he sacrifices needed character development and selling the actual premise of the episode in favor of a point that could have been made by other means. It’s inartful—painfully half cooked.

A similar sloppiness occurs on the episode’s back end. We’re at the climactic moment—the finish line of the race is in sight, and Angstrom is poised to win it, leaving Epzo behind. They argue. The Doctor intervenes, declaring that she has a suggestion, and… we hard cut to a few minutes later as Angstrom and Epzo walk in and declare the race a tie.…

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

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

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

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

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By 2018, when Chris Chibnall commenced the third primary creative era of the modern Doctor Who, media franchises were not so much increasingly the norm as wholly established as the norm. These were the days when high profile returns of long dormant franchises were the norm, whether in the form of outright revivals as things like Murphy Brown and Roseanne staggered from their graves for a new season, or in the ever popular form of reboots, with Lost in Space, Magnum, P.I., DuckTales, Charmed, and She-Ra all making returns. Film was much the same—nine of the top ten films in 2018 were installments of pre-existing franchises, four of them based on Marvel Comics properties. (This was in fact low—2017 and 2019 were each ten for ten, where 2018 had the differently nostalgic Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody to break things up.) These are the sorts of facts that make you start to sympathize deeply with Alan Moore at his crankiest. 

Curiously absent from this tendency thus far was Star Trek. Sure there’d been the three Chris Pine movies set in what is apparently widely referred to within fandom as the Kelvin Timeline, but this was a shocking meager return—three films from 2006-2016—for one of the two most iconic American sci-fi franchises, especially in an era when fandoms and franchises were so very much the norm. And so it was much overdue in late 2017 when CBS launched their streaming exclusive Star Trek: Discovery, the first attempt at a Star Trek TV show in over a decade. Unfortunately, the result had much to say bout the painfully cynical nature of franchise media in the late 2010s. 

To start, the show had what can only be called a troubled development. It was originally the product of Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller, who pitched an anthology series that would move to a new ship and era of Star Trek history with each season, starting just before the original 1960s series. Fuller worked on the show for the better part of a year before being sacked for failing to adhere to CBS’s over-ambitious production timeline for the show, and was replaced by Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harbets, who would eventually find themselves sacked for going over budget and for stories of abusive behavior during production. A microcosm of the tensions in play here comes with the discussion over uniforms, with Fuller originally wanting something that was based on the brightly colored 1960s uniforms, while CBS insisted on a more austere and military-style uniform, continuity (and for that matter nostalgia aesthetics) be damned. It’s a small thing, but indicative—the sort of thing that quietly speaks volumes about just how cynical an effort this actually was.

So it’s not a surprise that the resultant show was not good. If anything it’s a mild surprise that it was not bad either. Instead it hovers along at a vague watchability—a level that’s clearly tremendously disappointing from any perspective that holds a lot of hope about what Star Trek could be in 2017.…

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