I suppose there’s nowhere to begin other than the big reveal, given that it is by an outlandish margin the single worst lore reveal in the entire history of Doctor Who. Making the Doctor the secret origin of all of the Time Lords is absolutely appalling—the sort of “the main character must be the center of the mythology” crap that Doctor Who is historically at its best when it rebels against. Instead of being the schlubby mediocrity who ran away and stumbled through becoming a hero without ever realizing that was what they were working towards, the Doctor is now the Most Specialist Time Lord That Ever Did Time Lord, with magic powers above and beyond the other Time Lords and origins stretching back beyond even the days of Rassilon. The series is now committed to an endless parade of reveals about the secret history of Gallifrey, all of which the Doctor was apparently there for. It’s genuinely terrible—a reveal that takes the dumbest instincts of the Virgin era and strips off the brakes and hedges. It’s not the Other but the Doctor themself that’s at the heart of Gallifreyan history now. It’s as if the Cartmel Masterplan fucked the Leekley Bible and then gave the illegitimate child away to Ian Levine to foster.

Astonishingly, though, none of that actually captures how bad it is. It’s worth actually explaining the reveal out loud with words, so as to actually make your mind confront what happened here. The Shabogans are the indigenous people of Gallifrey who became the Time Lords by stealing the secrets of regeneration from the Doctor’s DNA. Seriously. Say that sentence out loud. Walk up to your bathroom mirror and look yourself in the eyes as you deliver those exact words in an even and calm tone. Repeat until you can do it with conviction, without bursting out laughing. It’ll be a good, healing experience.

As for the episode around it… it’s tempting to just derisively laugh and say “what episode around it.” The Doctor stands around for forty-five minutes while men explain the plot to her. Then, for a resolution, a character whose narrative importance after two episodes consists of “he’s played by a guy who was a minor character in Game of Thrones” swoops in to save the day. The companions have nothing to do but make tepid contributions to the tedious action sequences that fill the gaps between the equally tedious infodumps. The only characters with motivation are the Master and the Cybermen, whose motivation consists of a tattered post-it note saying “be evil.” Macguffins are simply vomited forth out of the ruins of Gallifrey whenever called for, most trashily as the Master casually goes “oh, but I kept all the bodies around.” A key piece of information is delivered to the Doctor in the form of “handily, there’s a legend that addresses the specific thing you’re wondering about.” The specific thing she’s wondering about, incidentally, is actually called the “death particle.” You may want to head back to the mirror and tell yourself that with a straight face too.…

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And so Chibnall, having egregiously whiffed the one-part finale structure (no shame in it, nobody else has ever made that work save for Moffat who cheated by having Heaven Sent work as a sort of first part), decides to fall back on a proven structure. This is not always a balm for Chibnall, who often seems to struggle with understanding how and why tropes work, instead simply faithfully repeating them shorn of key bits of context like a man in an increasingly bizarre quest to demonstrate how Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment might work in practice. Ascension of the Cybermen plays into that tendency, certainly. But there are relatively few misplaced steps compared to other Chibnall efforts. And this isn’t entirely because Chibnall is playing on easy mode. Yes, the basic structure pioneered by Moffat and Davies—a sense of mounting tension leading to a story-breaking reveal—is one of the easier ones to get to work, with the real challenge being in the back half. But Chibnall declines to go with the sort of zero frills monster runaround that he could have, instead interleaving the seemingly entirely disconnected story of Brendan the cop. 

This is, to Chibnall’s credit, a very Moffat move in which the tension is “wait, what kind of story am I watching?” And the decision to go with no reveal about it, leaving it as an incongruous detail to be connected later, is unexpected and probably the most interesting thing ever to happen in a Chibnall script. The answer is probably going to disappoint—I’ll put my bet on “he’s a timeless child” and not on something Cybermen-related, but that’s a next week discussion. This week, his presence made the story weirder, less predictable, and far more interesting.

Unfortunately once you get past him, were into pretty bog standard Chibnall filler. The promotional material stressed the guest role of Ravio as a super-competent fighter against the Cybermen. It sounds cool. But tell me honestly: are you 100% confident you can remember which of the disposable supporting cast she is? (Remembering which actress plays her is cheating.) Can you actually name another secondary character? I can’t. One of them had really buggy eyes. That’s about all I remember. Yaz and Graham get to do the Doctoring for a bit, which is a nice touch. But mostly, this is frighteningly generic Cybermen doing frightfully generic Cybermen things. (The moment of peak bathos, for me, was when they uncover some boxy-head classic models of Cybermen and attempt to, with a straight face, suggest that these were always the “warrior” caste of Cybermen. Past that, we’ve got, what? A lot of action scenes so adamantly no nonsense that Eric Saward would blanche and add a few jokes? A ranting cult leader Cyberman whose final fate (full conversion that strips him of his “unique” qualities) couldn’t be more clearly telegraphed? None of it is objectionable, but none of it is interesting.

The real problem, though, is the ending. It’s not just the aggressive non-shock of the Master being back.…

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*deep, calming breaths*

OK, so it’s a highlight of the Chibnall era. It features several of Jodie Whittaker’s best moments as the Doctor. It has an effective sense of mood and creepiness throughout. The arrival of the Cyberman at the halfway point effectively turns the entire story on its head. It uses the Cyberman well, drawing more body horror out of the concept than anything since… OK, since the last Cybermen story, but it at least has the decency to acknowledge that the Capaldi era actually happened, and anyway, this is getting an appreciably different sort of body horror off the concept. Despite having the oversized TARDIS crew and a large supporting cast, everyone actually feels like they have a character and gets at least one clear-cut moment to themselves. And there’s a bevy of clever bits—the skull and hand in the cradle is one of the best jump scares in recent Doctor Who memory, and giving Shelley a vision of his death is poetic and unsettling. Oh, and the Cyberman quoting Shelley is magnificently fucked up. Really, this is not merely competent, it’s well-executed. If the show were this well-made every week I wouldn’t be a burnt out and cynical husk of a fan who writes ostentatiously pessimistic parodies of her own work.

Unfortunately, all of this quality is in the service of a fucking “the Cyermen inspire Frankenstein” story. This is not so much bordering on self-parody as the capitol city. This is the sort of thing that when your sixteen-year-old cousin does in a Doctor Who fanfic you go “oh, bless.” It’s an idea that when Big Finish did, everyone went “well that’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?” It’s the most tedious, unimagnative “going with your first idea” bit of bullshit the series has coughed up in recent memory—an idea that is not merely bad but insulting.

It’s ironic that this should air the day that the Dalek Eruditorum post on The Invasion goes up, because it takes the cynicism of that story and dials it up to eleven. Never mind parading the Cybermen around a bunch of London landmarks to trumpet the series—we can take the entire literary tradition from which they originate and go claim that they’re inspired by Doctor Who. The show has flirted with this before, obviously, but always as a textual joke—the Doctor inspires The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Martha is the dark lady in Shakespare—but this is pitched in a largely serious story, as the core concept instead of as a joke at the end. Also, The Shakespeare Code was trash. Doctor Who’s tendency to romanticize great (wo)men of history is routinely annoying, but I’ll take the most mawkish speech about genius that Russell T Davies ever rewrote over the vapid exaltation of Doctor Who as the wellspring for all creativity. 

And on top of that we get the deeply fucked up morality of “sure, billions will die, but Percy Shelley is more important.” Never mind the “all of you will cease to exist” bit, which manages to make how time works incoherent in the exact opposite way of Orphan 55, this is a genuinely horrible line of thought, and one that’s only there to force the Doctor’s hand in letting the Cyberium out, which could have been achieved through dozens of other means, several of which would also involve restructuring the scene so that Mary Shelley actually accomplishes anything in it.…

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I have repeatedly criticized the Chibnall era for its dubious notion of “aboutness.” With Can You Hear Me? we have a partial success on that front, but its partiality ends up revealing the depths of the problem. The question “what is Can You Hear Me? about” is straightforward—an idiot could answer it. It’s about mental illness. And yet I find myself imagining the pitch meeting here.

“So what’s your story about?”
“Oh, it’s about mental illness.”
“Cool! What do you say about mental illness?”
“Ummmm… it’s about mental illness.”

Herein lies the difficulty. To ask a question I’ve asked plenty of times before, what, exactly, is all of this for? What perspective on the world is Doctor Who offering? What does it have to say? And when it comes to mental illness and this episode, the answer really appears to be “nothing.” Some vague platitudes about facing your fears being the essence of humanity (which come perilously close to “you have an obligation to willpower your way out of depression,” even if they do later endorse getting help) and that’s it. There’s no insights here—no substance.

The common right-wing asshole complaint about the Whittaker era is that it’s full of “virtue signalling.” This is of course what they say about any media that isn’t entirely about the concerns of white men, and so it’s tremendously infuriating to admit that in this instance they’re actually right. All of the wokeness in Chibnall Doctor Who is entirely performative. We don’t have a diverse cast because we want to tell stories about different perspectives and different sorts of people. We aren’t telling stories about the environment or racism or mental illness because we have something to say. We aren’t doing any of this because it’s interesting or worthwhile on its own merits. We’re doing it because Chibnall has concluded that what the hip kids want is “woke” television. Diversity and a sort of after-school special mentality towards issues are ends in themselves. Which, sure, yes, diversity is an end in itself, but here it appears to be the *only* end in play. That’s doesn’t make the diversity a bad thing, obviously, but it lessens the degree to which it’s a good thing. And it certainly renders the big themes fairly innefectual and disposable. Mental illness is a great topic for Doctor Who to tackle, but this isn’t tackling it—it’s using it to get approving headlines from culture journalists on a tight deadline looking for an easy review they can write in their sleep. I refuse to accept that having something to say about the world is not a minimum standard for television. An it’s one Doctor Who hasn’t met with any regularity for years.

Past the ineffectual engagement with theme, we have a lot of vague competence. I’m put in mind of a tweet by Jamie Mathieson I saw this week, where he said that the challenge when writing a familiar trope for television is coming up with a new perspective on it, as merely doing it competently is boring.…

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Let’s start with the biggest upsides. The story did not end by suggesting environmentalists were the real problem. It didn’t conclude that disabled people should use fewer straws. Indeed, politically it was basically ideal—a clear moral and ethical point that was the backdrop for an actual adventure instead of being sledgehammered in a “the moral of this story was” ending. And on top of that, it had well-defined characters and a coherent plot.

Obviously this is Stockholm Syndrome. Once again we are in the position of being pleasantly delighted that a story has come in at “vaguely competent” with a minimum of trauma. Even better, it’s done it three stories in a row, two of them rewritten by Chibnall. (Who has apparently managed the impressive feat of rewriting every person of color on staff this year, given next week’s credits.) This feels like a result, and while we know it shouldn’t, that’s where we are.

Nevertheless, it’s harder this week to really revel in an adequate job done more or less competently than it has been for the past two. Mostly this is down to small things. To do an extreme globe-hopping adventure in Doctor Who always feels a bit pointless—using the TARDIS as an airplane feels rather like bringing a Tissue Compression Eliminator to a knife fight. And as a result none of the locations really resonate—nothing feels like a distinct or coherent place. The (momentarily quite interesting) decision to fully split up the TARDIS crew evaporates quickly, and instead we just ping pong among locations with more vigor than coherence. The longstanding tendency of the new series’ acceleration to make Doctor Who’s genre-hopping into an exercise in reducing every genre to a Doctor Who story here becomes something far more insidious, where everywhere in the world ends up feeling like a diversity-minded portrayal of the United Kingdom.

Whittaker also feels particularly on autopilot here. McTighe and Chibnall end up writing her as a collection of tics, and Whittaker finds herself lost in it, left with nothing to do but do the same basic “I have part of a plan” joke on repeat in between outbursts of particularly bad technobabble. This becomes something of a masterclass in how not to do a female Doctor—there’s what feels like a conscious decision not to make her angry or troubling at any point, and so she’s left to talk about humanity poisoning itself with microplastics with a big enthusiastic “I love teaching science” grin on her face. It’s instructive to imagine how much the testiness of Capaldi’s Doctor would help here—how much the “we don’t have time to mourn” bit out of Mummy on the Orient Express could have smoothed over the “Gabriela fails to really be very upset about her best friend dying” plot, for instance, or even just how a Doctor who was actually furious at Suki’s actions could have better set up the effort and failure to work with her in the climax so that it didn’t feel perfunctory. (And let’s not even talk about doing the “martyr yourself piloting the vehicle on a suicide mission” trope in the wake of Clara’s hairtie bit in Flatline.)…

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Less an episode than a trailer for some still unannounced finale, which is less of a problem than it should be. In many ways it benefits, not so much from the diminished expectations of the Chibnall era as from the specific pathologies the era has led us to expect. Sure, it can only narrowly be described as having a plot or being about anything, but that’s practically every episode these days. This one at least filled the vast chasms of space between it and a point with a lot of quality what the fuckery. 

Well. It filled the space with a lot of fan-trolling continuity porn. There’s a definite “what on Earth did the normies think of this,” feeling here. That said, Chibnall (who was surely behind the big picture decisions here) made reasonably savvy choices in that regard—a character who, while he hasn’t been seen in a decade, anchored a hit TV show in his own right and a reveal that’s long on implications for the series’ history, but that also plays as Big News in is own right even if you’re not the sort of person who goes “is this another Morbius Doctor or some sort of Season 6c thing?” The only thing actually likely to be normie-puzzling are the Judoon themselves, who were offered as the announced premise with plenty of time for Googling. 

Which leaves the spectacle of continuity shit. Your mileage may vary, but you’re reading Doctor Who reviews on a site that did a story-by-story blog of the entire freaking show, novels and all, so presumably this hits you in the same lizard-brain recesses that have a favorite opening sentence to a Terrence Dicks novelization and an unjustifiable fondness for The Five Doctors. Whether or not this is a particularly worthwhile pleasure is largely beside the point: it’s a concrete pleasure—a sense of there being a thing the show is for—in a way that the Chibnall era has previously not really had. That it’s an emptier masturbation with continuity than anything the Moffat era ever did is ultimately besides the point.

Of course, saying much more than that is also difficult. A secret past Doctor, Cybermen, the Timeless Child, the Master, Captain Jack, and the re-destruction of Gallifrey are all just bibs and bobs of a premise right now that we haven’t seen stitched into an actual story yet. It’s like if you reduced The Day of the Doctor to “a secret past Doctor, Zygons, David Tennant, Billie Piper, a barn, and the Time War,” or The Two Doctors to “Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Sontarans, location filming in Spain, and a fish called the gumblejack.” And while you can argue that both of those stories really do basically reduce down to those lists, at the end of the day the gulf in quality between them makes it clear that there’s a lot of ways this can turn out. Of course, in the end it’s being done by the writer of The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos, so cause for actual hope remains thin on the ground. …

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Were I of a cynical mind, I might suggest that the show is in dire straits when a great man of history story that proclaims the future to belong to a white guy and suggests that it’s good to be a billionaire stands out as a relative highlight of the season. Except we all know that the show is in embarrassing shape, with a showrunner who continues to struggle with the notion of aboutness in narrative. Why take an episode whose sins all fall under the heading of “basically the same shit the program does in all its celebrity historicals” and complain about that when it breaks a five episode streak of the show breaking down in far more fundamental ways?

All of which is to say that “Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror” is pretty good, which is to say that it has the basics down in a way nothing since “It Takes You Away” has really come close to. There’s a refreshing sense of conceptual unity—the conflict between Tesla and Edison, where Tesla is a visionary inventor and Edison a more cynically pragmatic and business-oriented sort, is mirrored by the technological scavenger villains. There’s a sense of actually getting the guns on the mantleplace to go off—Wardenclyffe is introduced early on, then becomes a cool location for a last stand. Tesla’s message from Mars (a real historical detail) is brought up, then made use of. And the basic ideas are just fun. Tesla is an obvious choice of historical figures for Doctor Who to do—an opportunity to do a big steampunk romp that matches well with Whittaker’s more “get her hands dirty working on stuff” character, at least when they remember to have that be a trait. 

There are oddities, but most of them aren’t the fault of this script. Even in the hands of a competent writer, three companions turns out to simply be too many to make work in a fifty minute episode when you also have to introduce a bespoke world. Nobody is well-served here, and it mostly feels like you could give different scenes to different people with no real substantive changes to the episode. The cast is unwieldy and everyone is suffering from it. There’s also a bizarre lack of consistency to the Doctor’s characterization as her pacifism goes out the window in order to have her revel in the potential destruction of an alien race. Guns remain bad, but giant lightning-shooting towers are great. But this is largely a good change to the character, whose passivity and lack of willingness to confront evil has been a major problem. Sure, it’s weird to see copyright infringement be the hill upon which she’ll kill, but the fact remains that this is Whittaker’s most (forgive me) electrifying villain confrontation yet.

In the end, though, the cynicism is inescapable. This is a daft celebrity historical romp. It’s the best story of the season to date, but that just means that this is a season where the daft historical romps are the standout highlights.…

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An episode with its heart in the right place and its head largely on the moon. In this regard it resembles Himes’ previous effort. The problem is that where “It Takes You Away” moved among a bunch of elements that were batshit weird and largely unlike anything we’d ever seen before, “Orphan 55” moves through a bunch of Doctor Who standards. These are generally among the more interesting Doctor Who standards—a dodgy resort a la The Macra Terror or Delta and the Bannermen, the main reveal from The Mysterious Planet, and a big heavy-handed environmental message like it’s The Green Death. These are all basically good components.

Unfortunately, Himes’s sugar rush sense of momentum keeps any of them from going anywhere. The supporting cast is overstuffed and undercooked, feeling at times like a cut-rate Voyage of the Damned. Interesting ideas flop oddly around the screen, briefly contemplating becoming significant plot threads before declining to. What exactly are the Dregs doing, killing some people and weirdly torturing Benni in a way that doesn’t actually make him stop being a weird comic relief character? What’s the actual substance of the relationship between Kane and Bella? There are stories here, but they’re being rushed past in favor of something that structurally feels more or less like The Ghost Monument.

This remains extremely puzzling to see. There’s a continual failure to quite remember what stories are supposed to look like. This is structured like a serial that we’re watching all the parts of in 45 minutes. And the parts appear to be about six minutes long. This is a more coherent structure than Chibnall himself generally manages, but it’s baffling to see Doctor Who suddenly attain the basic narrative cohesion of a shitty 90s cult television show. Ian Levine’s hilarious “friendship over with Doctor Who, now Babylon 5 is my best friend” bit two years ago actually makes a vague amount of sense in a world where Doctor Who feels like it’s on the same basic quality level of Seaquest DSV. It’s like a peek into the universe where Fox picked Doctor Who over Sliders in 1996. 

Reviewing it ends up feeling a lot like when I did comic reviews—that immensely frustrating sense week after week of going “you are failing at the most basic tasks of actually telling a coherent story.” Except comics are a low-paying medium run by companies more exploitative of both employees and customers than usual in which the reason people work is usually fannish love instead of actual talent. This is BBC One in the age of Peak Fucking Television, and it leaves you wishing they’d go hire Dan Weiss and David Benioff, who at least understand what earning your dramatic payoff should look like in the abstract, even if they can’t actually make it work. This isn’t even broadly shaped like coherent televisual narrative—it’s just vomiting a random set of concepts at the screen and hoping a point comes out somewhere.

Actually, that’s unfair—it’s perfectly willing to hammer you in the face with its point.…

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