Everything Tastes Wrong (The Battle of Rintrah and Uveth)
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.
When Chris Chibnall did his traditional end of era interview with Doctor Who Magazine, he singled The Battle of Robot Okapis as the story he regretted the most, suggesting that it got caught up in a time crunch. He’s hardly the first, of course—fundamentally it’s what went wrong for The Wedding of River Song as well. But equally, one has to wonder how Chibnall ended up in a time crunch in the first place. For heaven’s sake, Moffat had already given him a two year transition. Broadchurch was done by the middle of 2016. There was literally a year between that and preproduction on series 11. Chibnall had pared the episode count down by 17%, even if he’d added five minutes to the ten episodes he did make. This should have been one of the most relaxed productions in series history, even factoring in new production team jitters, and yet somehow Chibnall found himself filming a first draft of his series finale. Rumors abound about why exactly this happened, and one grimly hopes the story comes out some day, but no matter how you cut it, it’s a surprisingly abject failure of… Chibnall’s job, basically. Like, the raw professional competence that nominally justifies Chris Chibnall’s role as executive producer of Doctor Who. That’s the thing that fails here.
Because honestly, what’s more time going to do to something as fundamentally pointless as The Battle of Random Encounters? We’re talking about an episode of television whose primary goal appears to be “Planet of Fire done right,” with some added bits grafted in from Time-Flight and The Pirate Planet. Its opening couple of minutes are one of the strangest moments of the modern series as we, with no sense of irony, development, or progress, simply begin with two and a half minutes—a solid 5% of the entire episode—of unreconstructed Generic Spiritual Aliens straight out of the Williams through Saward era of insipid science fiction premises. Instantly one longs for the days in which the new series was afraid to so blatantly invoke the cliches of the classic one. It is as though someone has looked at The Doctor’s Daughter and seen a role model. As if someone watched The Empress of Mars and thought it a bit too progressive, a bit too modern. Maybe the correct lesson to learn from Timelash was simply “don’t do that.”
There are things that could have been improved, yes. Maybe some successive number of drafts or the firm paternal hand of Russell T Davies could have made “the planet drives you mad” into something that conjured the Lovecraftian horror that Paltraki’s mission apparently experienced instead of as a desperately contrived mechanism for regulating the speed at which he explained the plot. Maybe the plight of the Ux could have been turned into something with an ounce of substance, instead of a plot whose resolution hinges on which of the two encounters with Andinio the Doctor opted to reveal to the thing she knew from the start. Maybe the repeated infelicities like a species of which there are only two members living on three planets, Yaz being flummoxed by the planet nam “Stebble” despite it practically being a homophone of Sheffield, or, you know, the basic act of naming your eponymous planet Raxacoricofallapatorius on Clom could have been edited out in favor of even vaguely technically competent writing.
But even if you did all of that you’d be left with a story that looked at Peter Davison’s penultimate episode and thought “you know what would fix this? If Anthony Ainley was more like David Banks!” That, more to the point, thought that Tzim-Sha was an epic threat that the Doctor needed to face a second time, built on nothing so much as hastily editing the word “Stenza” into The Ghost Monument, itself a script that shows all the wonders available in a Chris Chibnall second draft. That can’t come up with conceptual stakes better than “is it better to imprison someone for all eternity than to kill them” or “is religious fundamentalism destructive,” and then proved too timid to even answer that second question with a “yes”? Whose best idea is to see what happens if you give Bradley Walsh a giant laser gun prop and tell him to imitate Beryl Reid? (This is legitimately a great idea, but so was “have Kate O’Mara do a Bonnie Langford impression.”)
Without anything as comprehensively odious as the strangulation scene of The Twin Dilemma or the casual racism of The Celestial Toymaker, we have run into something with the same fundamental property of simply not having any good ideas whatsoever while simultaneously having quite a lot of bad ones. The real problem, at the heart of this, is that there is simply not actually a reason for it to exist. There is nothing to latch onto. Like Graham’s “should I murder Tzim-Sha” plot, it is an empty marker, the formal properties of television executed with no actual content.
The crushing irony here is that Chibnall is making two separate decisions, each pandering to one potential audience for the show, while not realizing that the decision is largely alienating to the other. This kind of vapid Sawardian neoclassicism has an audience. There are in fact people who have been demanding more or less exactly this since 2005. Admittedly there’s only like five of them, and their entire social life consists of posting on GallifreyBase, but they exist. But their demand is fundamentally reactionary, and in the openly fucking fascist world of 2018 that reactionary tendency was always going to react poorly to being given exactly what they wanted only with a woman. Meanwhile the younger fans who might actually be interested in Chibnall’s young and diverse casting have zero interest in a Planet of Fire remake. It’s too superficially progressive for the reactionaries, who, let’s face it, don’t really have the capacity to go beyond the superficial in the first place, and too reactionary for anyone interested in a female Doctor. There’s a couple vanishingly small micro-audiences that survived and liked this era, and we’ll find time to talk about each of them, but frankly even they don’t tend to go around citing The Battle of Rancid Avocados as a personal favorite.
So this was the moment that the hope went out. The intensity of that turn is, of course, obscured by the fact that I read the preceding nine episodes with hindsight, but nevertheless, there’s something significant here—a point at which the Chibnall era stopped simply being a bad era of Doctor Who and started being something more comprehensively malevolent.
Because, of course, the correct thing to do is simply to stop watching. Which, looking at the ratings, was what a couple million people did. Some of them, no doubt, were fans who discovered the limit of their fandom. One of those would have been me—I had no real desire to keep watching Doctor Who at this point. It was not a good show, and I had much better things to do with my life. Except, of course, that it’s literally my job. My Patreon reliably does a solid 20% better when I’m writing about Doctor Who than it does when I’m not.
This is quite a challenge, as “this does not deserve our attention” is not sustainable over two thousand words. Having exhausted the redemptive reading over the previous nine posts, only to find that even a redeemed Chibnall era can at best aspire to adequacy, I am left with only one point of comparison from a writing perspective: the Colin Baker era. That I was able to reframe into a furious exorcism of longstanding flaws. But that’s not the case here. For one thing, I only had to write about eleven Colin Baker stories; I’ve got twenty-nine this time. But the real problem is that all of this feels like a completely unforced error. The Colin Baker era was the climax of a crisis that had been building for nearly a decade—a case of numerous bills coming due at once. There was actually a story to be told there. Whereas here, Doctor Who went from having a very good showrunner in 2017 who was still doing what felt like essential and vital work even if he was clearly past his peaks, to a year later being complete shit. There’s no larger pattern to draw on in turning this era’s failures into a climactic exorcism, because what would they be exorcising beyond themselves?
So here we are, in a situation with few options beyond implacable emnity. If one is committed to long term caring about Doctor Who for the reasons that I am, there is nothing to do with the Chibnall era besides hate it. And yet for all that it is terrible television, from a critical perspective it remains frustratingly slippery and elusive. The Battle of Reruns and Callbacks is a perfect case study here. It is awful, and the reasons it is awful are documentable, but nothing follows from them. It’s bad because, well, it’s just badly done. The Chibnall era’s worst sin is, at the end of the day, its comprehensive vapidity; to fail at doing something uninteresting is not, unfortunately, very interesting. To hate it, fundamentally, is to care more about it than it cares about itself. This tends to mean that the critique gets dragged down with it. Certainly that’s the direction the doomed efforts at redemptive reading thus far feel like they went in. Nevertheless, we are stuck with this ragged, bleeding wound in the history of Doctor Who. Somehow, we must find something in this absolute abyss of nothingness.
March 11, 2024 @ 10:30 am
I had already tapped out on this season before The Battle of NASCAR in Kosovo had even aired, but God, the amount of sheer nothingness exuded by the title alone is stunning.
March 11, 2024 @ 10:32 am
Grumble grumble the TV Movie is quite good, a clear template for NuWho, and the era it actually did spawn (the EDAs) was broadly terrific, grumble grumble. (Even if one is more allergic to its superficial patina of Americanisms than I, I still say it’s unfair to list it alongside the likes of “Twin Dilemma”; it is at the very least a very well-executed example of the thing it wants to be, even if one should dislike that thing, whereas the thing about “Twin Dilemma”, “Invisible Enemy”, “Toymaker”, and of course “Battle”, is that they are rubbish in execution.)
March 11, 2024 @ 10:36 am
And while I’m being all contrarian, Planet of Fire is already “done right” as it is. It’s good! It’s a different flavour of good from an Enlightenment but I’ll staunchly back it as one of the Good Davisons. Of course, this does mean it in no way needed remaking, and indeed, Battle is wildly inferior to it in all respects. (Even raw spectacle, which is a bizarre department for a Classic Who story to manage to outclass a NuWho competitor, however wretched the script… and yet! Say what you will about Planet, it does at least have… [checks notes]… colours.)
March 12, 2024 @ 2:17 am
Thank you! I agree about Planet of Fire and was going to comment on that even if you hadn’t gotten there first. It’s full of strong character moments for an arriving (Peri) and departing (Turlough) character, it’s an attack on theocracy that looks more relevant every year, it’s frequently beautiful to look at, and it gives a nice ambient sense of creeping planetary catastrophe that also, well, gets more relevant every year. And while I always found the pre-John-Simm Master a very poorly conceived villain, at least Planet used to give Peri something to show her mettle against, and then seeing him teeny-tiny is also fun.
(Mind you, I also hit puberty/ sexual awakening at almost exactly the same time that Nicola Bryant was being featured in a bathing suit, so that didn’t hurt for me either. But I genuinely think it’s a good episode. Whereas Battle of Ramen vs Coleslaw is still the worst hour of scripted TV I’ve ever watched voluntarily. I’d quit the show before the Timeless Children hit…)
March 12, 2024 @ 2:51 pm
Thanks! I endorse most of this, and I’m a defender of the Classic Master besides. In any event, to the extent that the Ainley Master was breaking down as any kind of serious character, Planet of Fire is very aware of it; in the first place it makes copious fun of him, and in the second place it kills him off. I believe it was Jayce Black who remarked that the Master/Doctor dynamic in that on feels very much predicated on the fact that the Doctor has outgrown the Master; his hearts aren’t really in the rivalry anymore, and he can only look on with stony weariness as the evil clown runs around chewing on the scenery.
…And indeed, only look down with that same aggravated impassivity as he burns to death. We got Survival and the funniest bits of Mark of the Rani and Trial out of his return, so we shouldn’t complain, but I do feel it would have behooved Planet to officially remain that incarnation’s last bow. Considered as the anticipated finale of Davison’s era, clearing his board in preparation for the new guy, giving the Master such a dramatic-and-yet-undignified sendoff truly feels like a promise that his unceremonious return in the C.Baker era proceeds to break without, by that point, even realising it’s doing anything pathetic or stupid at all.
(On a related note, while in hindsight it looks like a harbinger of the degradations to come, I don’t think there’s anything too eyebrow-raising about Peri’s bathing suit within Planet of Fire itself — in part because she’s so strongly written here, and in part because the episode does also give us Turlough in a bathing suit in the same scenes, such that it feels more like equal-opportunity eye-candy than garden-variety straight-male-gaze.)
March 15, 2024 @ 11:44 am
The Planet of Fire, at a very minimum, was trying to do something. BORAK was not trying to do anything. I can respect a story that aims high and misses unless it does so in an unusually atrocious manner, but not a story that aims low. The point of Doctor Who is not to aim low.
March 11, 2024 @ 10:39 am
This is also in retrospect, but I’m mad that this episode was so bad it’s where my wife stopped watching, so when the 14th Doctor came back and references were made to seasons she hadn’t seen, I had to try to explain wtf happened in those seasons to her, and felt like a moron for not only watching that crap (fandom is a helluva drug), but retaining any of it. Screw you, Battle of Reclusive Arbitrariness!
March 11, 2024 @ 12:40 pm
I have also watched the whole Chibnall era but thankfully I seem to have forgotten the vast majority of it. Reading these essays I’m constantly like “wait, that happened?”.
March 11, 2024 @ 8:15 pm
I do not know how I’ve retained any of it, it’s drivel. I’m jealous you’ve managed to get through unscathed.
March 12, 2024 @ 3:43 am
Oh, I most certainly didn’t, it just affected me differently. “The flames are all long gone but the pain lingers on” etc.
And to add one more thought to your comment, that happened with my wife as well. So much so that now she’s still reluctant to give the new Doctor a try. Thanks Chris.
March 11, 2024 @ 10:56 am
The Battle of Radio 4 Extra
March 11, 2024 @ 10:59 am
The Battle of Rastas at Kohl’s
March 11, 2024 @ 11:16 am
The Battle of Random Added Consonants
March 11, 2024 @ 11:32 am
The Battle of Russian Kramer
March 11, 2024 @ 12:21 pm
The Battle of Rebarbative Aardvarks
March 11, 2024 @ 4:51 pm
The Bagels of Ramadan Unkosher
March 11, 2024 @ 9:02 pm
The Batlle of Anorak Sooks
March 13, 2024 @ 2:02 am
The Baseline of Vacant Trope Praxis
March 14, 2024 @ 11:04 am
I wish to add the one I came up with in the Discord for posterity: The Ballad of Rambunctious Kookaburras.
March 16, 2024 @ 4:14 pm
The Battle of Russell, Add Colours
March 12, 2024 @ 8:17 am
The Battle of Raccoons and Koalas
March 12, 2024 @ 2:09 pm
The Bottles of Rincewind and Luggage
April 12, 2024 @ 8:26 am
The Battle of Rust Or Van Kronos
March 11, 2024 @ 11:36 am
Well, I actually did LOL at “The Battle of Raymour & Flanigan”. Probably a joke very few of your readers who aren’t upstate New Yorkers will get!
I remember thinking this was the biggest damp squib of a season finale we’d had in ages. Although ironically, with all of this season’s flaws, there does seem to have been some effort made into reshaping the show into one that explored new settings and characters, rather than dwelling on the past. This season featured no returning monsters or characters, and didn’t dwell on the Doctor’s past like so much of the new series that created the Time War and then could never manage to shake free of it. In that sense, it was a bit refreshing. Pity the execution was so lackluster. After this season, the show pivoted to a reliance on spectacle and returning continuity, until we get the Flux, which was a literally and diegetically a season where the show’s past gets whirled up in a blender.
Obviously, what the show was doing in Series 11 wasn’t working, but I feel like the wrong lessons were drawn from it.
March 11, 2024 @ 11:39 am
I understand that “no continuity stuff” was a mandate from the BBC, so I’m not even sure we can give Chibnall credit for that.
March 11, 2024 @ 12:27 pm
And somehow he got around that with his own stylistic references/allusions to past eras in continuity.
March 11, 2024 @ 2:15 pm
They have it in Connecticut too, and she’s from Connecticut.
March 11, 2024 @ 2:25 pm
Yeah, they’re throughout the northeast. My mother had a bunch of stuff from them, and we’ve got a fair chunk ourselves. (Indeed, I’m typing this from atop a lovely Lugano Microfiber Reclining Sofa we got last summer because we lacked any living room furniture I could work on without ending up in pain after.)
March 11, 2024 @ 11:35 pm
I think what this season proves is that old monsters and stuff don’t actually have an impact on the show’s ability to be forward and outward looking. If the lack of returning characters or references to the past was intended to help it focus on new characters and places…well, it didn’t show any interest in the characters it conjures up or the places it takes us to. The show just shows us stuff and shrugs it’s shoulders and says “ah well, what are you going to do?”
Whereas a well written episode using the Daleks or whatever use them to put the setting and characters under stress and show us how they react. An old knife opening fresh oysters. The Daleks invading Satellite Five shows us new things about the crew and the Rose and the Doctor. It shows us new things this TV show can do.
And of course the history of the Doctor the show ‘dwelled on’ was not real history at all. It was newly invented story placed in the character’s recent past to give him more ways to bounce off events. Gridlock, for example, doesn’t ‘dwell on the Doctor’s past’, it uses it briefly to power a whole episode from a small lie, then end it with honesty, marking a change in his relationship with Martha. This kind of interest in character is a stranger for the whole Chibnall era.
March 11, 2024 @ 12:19 pm
I’m glad that this entry brings up this story as a microcosm for how much this era manages to not appeal to anyone it seems to want to find it appealing, as this is the story that really made that clear for me… and that I get a good segue into my own observation about this story that I’m a broken record about.
I distinctly remember how much the discourse immediately after airing was split into two takes: “That sucked because Doctor Who finales need epic stakes, not just personal drama!” and “That was good because not all Doctor Who finales should be about epic stakes, and it lacking them to focus on personal drama was refreshing!”
Which is amazing, because this story DIDN’T ignore epic stakes to focus on drama. It has two godlike aliens worshipping a recurring villain from an previous episode who’s been planning revenge on the Doctor for centuries, a gigantic space battle on a planet that drives people insane, and Earth being shot with a giant laser that threatens to destroy it in the same way that’s already taken dozens of other worlds. All typical series finale stuff on paper, but all so poorly executed, communicated and just plain shit that everyone (including myself, and I’d wager the person reading this) forgot as soon as the credits rolled, and exclusively remembered the two minutes where Bradley Walsh was on screen and they almost felt something. Thousands of people, including genuine fans of the era trying to defend it and people who can recite hours of trivia about bad Doctor Who, and every single one of them went online to discuss a nonexistent version of this episode that only has about 98% of it’s actual plot.
March 11, 2024 @ 12:49 pm
“if you kill him you’ll be just like him”
Thanks doctor who
March 11, 2024 @ 6:07 pm
The moment when I realized that this was going to be the core conflict of the episode was the moment I stopped watching it and just skimmed through the finale a bit. Kerblam! was the episode that ended my completionist habit regarding Doctor Who, then this episode sealed the deal.
March 11, 2024 @ 12:58 pm
I am going to push back here on the idea that there are conceptual stakes regarding “is it better to imprison someone for all eternity than to kill them” in The Battle of Rooty Batooty.
For that to happen, the episode would need to actually ask the question. It doesn’t, because it already has decided on an answer: yes, it’s completely fine to trap someone for eternity, why would you even doubt that? Just ignore any opinions the Doctor expressed on the subject in The Woman Who Fell To Earth: she has clearly already forgotten those herself, and is merrily undermining her own prior distaste for weapons by happily advocating explosives over guns because in Chibnall ethics apparently, I dunno, having your legs blown off by a bomb is better than getting shot in them or something.
Chibnall either thinks that eternal psychological torture (it’s made very clear that the people in stasis are aware and conscious of their plight) is better than death, or he just doesn’t recognise the implications of his own ideas. I don’t know which is more terrifying. The former system of ethics is the spawn of nightmares and a spawner of subsequent nightmares. The latter implies that philosophical zombies are real and Chris Chibnall is one.
March 15, 2024 @ 11:49 am
It’s almost certainly the latter.
March 11, 2024 @ 1:39 pm
Forgive me for the crackpot take, but Chibnall Doctor Who happened in the era where all the cornerstones of 2010s culture up until now seemed to become awful. 2016 was the year politics hit the threshold of being permaterrible and the year when all the pop stars died (most relevantly to Doctor Who, David Bowie was the first major head who set the tone for it). 2017 and 2018 was a process of watching all the inescapable pop stars of the early 2010s put out critically slimed albums (Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Eminem) or morph into unrecognisable, diminished forms (Maroon 5 goes fully pop, Rihanna goes fully makeup, One Direction goes in multiple directions, Gaga decuntifies for a movie, Nicki starts to collaborate with sex offenders, B.o.B. goes flat Earth, and Kanye West becomes Ye). The stars who hit strides during this period were mostly going queerer (SOPHIE, Tyler the Creator) or queerer and Blacker (Janelle Monae, Lana Del Rey). After the soft vintage fuzziness of the first half of the decade — a retreat into nostalgia because no future could be imagined — what followed was this absolutely suffocating moment where the guard HAD to be changed but nothing could shift it. A big, yawning cultural wound where the only prize was that a woman was sometimes allowed to be the main character. Chibnall Who was perfect for that moment.
March 11, 2024 @ 3:11 pm
This is one of the most insightful things I’ve ever read about recent history, and I have no further comment.
March 11, 2024 @ 1:47 pm
My favourite one of these I’ve heard is “Some Ranskoors Do Av Em”.
March 11, 2024 @ 3:14 pm
It is telling that I remember absolutely hating this episode yet remember absolutely nothing that happened in it. Had I not looked up what story was coming up next on this blog, I would not have even remembered that it was the season finale. Contentless indeed.
March 11, 2024 @ 3:23 pm
You know, I do think there IS a story to tell here–one of BBC Studios constant frustration with not having enough control over the production. Their annoyance at RTD and Moffat shutting down their spin off and movie ideas.
They finally got the level of control over the production they wanted–and they were confident. This will be their new era, one they can truly merchandise and profit off of! And then flint hits steel, and they realize they don’t know how to make a spark.
March 12, 2024 @ 4:56 am
The more I read about the behind the scenes of Chibnall’s Who, the more I become convinced that its big issue was that BBC Studios were completely incompetent from start to finish, determined to put their stamp on the show without enough resources to do so, nor any ideas for the show that anyone but them actually wanted. Chibnall’s doing the best he can but everything appears to have been so much uphill battle that everyone’s more concentrated on just getting 10 episodes of television, not in making them good.
March 12, 2024 @ 6:00 am
Where are you reading behind the scenes stuff about Chibnall Who? As far as I can tell it’s the most closed off production in the series’ history.
March 13, 2024 @ 4:02 pm
There’s a bit of a misunderstanding here of what BBC Studios is. In 2018 BBC Worldwide and the former in-house production units from BBC public service had merged into one company but were, and still are, technically two different companies, BBC Studios Distribution and BBC Studios Production. The former Worldwide section had been mad keen on the Whoniverse idea (global ambition, spin-offs, crossovers, tie-ins etc), as it surely meant more commercial opportunities, word is thou that whilst RTD and Moffat were receptive Chibbers was firmly against such nonsense, but then so were the commissioners at BBC public service who wanted a show that fit into the schedule around Strictly, a watchable enough drama for families that held it’s own with less immediate regard for international sales and definitely accessible to audiences who’ve left the telly on after Antiques Roadshow. The story of this era is less about whether Doctor Who could compete with the MCU and more could it hold it’s own with Casualty and Silent Witness. What has happened next has proved that it clearly wasn’t the right show for that task.
March 11, 2024 @ 4:02 pm
Ironic thing is, “The Battle of Ranskoor” isn’t even that bad a title. Just get rid of the other bits!
March 14, 2024 @ 6:05 pm
There would still be the issue of the episode not actually featuring said eponymous battle, which happens before the story even begins, in what is Yet Another Baffling Decision.
Attempts to argue that the real Battle is ‘they run around a bit being cross with Tzim-Sha’ or ‘the battle inside Graham’s conscience’ have been made in the past but do not convince.
I am reminded of RTD saying in The Writer’s Tale that “battle is just a shit word”.
March 15, 2024 @ 9:19 am
Another frustrating thing is that the Doctor (or maybe Paltraki?) at one point translates Ranskoor Av Kolos as “Disintegrator of the Soul”, and THAT’s an episode title right there.
March 15, 2024 @ 9:24 am
Although I suppose it would have perfectly set up comments like “Disintegrator of the Soul really did what it said on the tin”.
March 11, 2024 @ 6:25 pm
Maybe the actual interesting thing about this episode is that a race of aliens which only exist two at a time with spiral markings on their cheeks is kind of sort of cribbed from Homestuck? I mean, it isn’t, but it’s weirdly specific (in Homestuck it was a reference to Saw, which is basically the only thing that comes up if you google “spiral cheeks”.)
March 12, 2024 @ 3:40 am
At the time, this episode had a crushing emptiness to it. Something I used to love, hollowed out and drained. A walking, smiling corpse. Like you say, the only thing left to do was to stop watching but I couldn’t, for whatever reason, and so the only other thing left to do was to hate it. The Chibnall era will have its cultural legacy but its personal legacy for me is this: making me, however temporarily, the sort of person that spends their time hatewatching a fucking television show.
This era of the show might not function as an exorcism but for me at least, this stretch of TARDIS Eruditorum does. Exposing the howling void and banishing it so that we can all be free of it. Or perhaps it’s more like therapy. Revisiting the trauma to understand it, to work through it. To finally let go. I don’t want to hate Chibnall Who, I want to forget it. Thank you for helping me get there.
March 12, 2024 @ 1:13 pm
There was a weird sense watching this series of thinking “hang on…that just happened and it was supposed to be ok ” and wondering if anyone else had even noticed. It started with Arachnids In The UK when the Doctor objected to shooting the spiders and locked them in a vault to starve instead – as I recall I mentioned this in an online discussion elsewhere and someone confidently told mer that the Doctor’s questionable morality here would be addressed later in the season (addressed , not repeated). Then there was the worker’s activist turning out to be the real villain at space Amazon. Finally there was this where Graham and Ryan finally decide to be the better men and rise above their desire for revenge by entombing Tim Shaw fully concious forever rather than killing him, and getting congratulated by the Doctor . I still find it utterly bizarre that this ended up on screen.
March 12, 2024 @ 1:26 pm
“To hate it, fundamentally, is to care more about it than it cares about itself”.
And that’s all that needs to be said
March 12, 2024 @ 1:50 pm
I certainly feel like I benefitted a lot from taking a long break before watching this. God, when did I see this? Did I wait until after the end of the Trump era? Until after I was in Therapy? Did I wait a full four years before actually engaging with this? How many seasons of this were there? Were there three Christmas specials with Daleks? Everything is just a big blur. Was the time loop one during the Chibnall era?
Anyway, we watched this eventually. Maybe we watched Flux first? And… I mean, my only real reaction was that it felt like it was doing a lot of work to not actually accomplish anything. It wasn’t really about much of anything. I can’t remember it well enough to hate it. There were points in Moffatt’s Who where I was actively hurt and angry about what had been done to the show. But Chibnall just made me not care. I profoundly did not care about this.
March 12, 2024 @ 1:51 pm
Oh, also: The Battle of Radagast the Brown.
March 12, 2024 @ 11:04 pm
Nope. Even with all the cues here, I can’t remember what happened in this episode at all.
March 13, 2024 @ 12:50 pm
Nether can I, I have seen all of Jodie’s episodes (except the Flux series) and struggle to remember most of them.
March 13, 2024 @ 9:15 am
In an earlier thread, there was discussion of whether Torchwood S1 was actually better than this. It was rightly pointed out that the ratings weren’t the best measure of quality, so I turned to the most reliable source of truth I know, the Eruditorum comments on End of Days. We agreed it was flawed, but comparing that thread and this, the feeling then was that there were at least interesting/unusual elements for us to get our teeth into. El picked up on some genuine themes, even while saying that doing an RTD style finale on a Torchwood budget is a bad idea. I do understand that, especially in hindsight, Torchwood failing to be great wasn’t a big deal, where Doctor Who failing to be great in an era where we really needed it inspired genuine pain, anger, and fear for the safety of the show we loved. Nonetheless, I would still say that comparing the two threads really reveals the difference in substance between the two episodes.
I have stronger memories of end of Days, which I haven’t watched since 2006, than I do of this. What the hell happened that a writer with more than a decade of new experience somehow got worse? This really is an intriguing and bizarre mystery to me.
March 15, 2024 @ 9:45 am
I have come to the conclusion that the main problem with Chibnall’s Doctor Who writing is that he’s not used to writing for an audience that includes children, and (unlike Moffat, Davies, Cartmel, Bidmead, Holmes etc.) he doesn’t trust them to follow complex plots or process complex ideas. So everything in his Doctor Who had to be exactly what it looks like on the face of it, there can be no subtext or depth, and he executes all the classic tropes in the expected manner with no subversion on the assumption that they will be new to the viewers (when in fact children these days are a lot more media savvy than they’re given credit for).
I remember reading that Chibnall has said his target audience was 8-year-olds, and that strikes me as aiming far too young. Can’t remember who said Doctor Who was for “the intelligent 14-year-old”, but I think that’s about right.
March 15, 2024 @ 4:09 pm
Yeah, it’s quite notable that unlike Moffat and Davies (Press Gang, Dark Season, Century Falls) he had no experience prior to Who in writing intelligent series aimed at children but which could perfectly well be enjoyed by adults.
March 13, 2024 @ 11:50 am
Calling Chibnall “Sawardian” is an insult to Eric Saward, who IMO should not be blamed for JNT forcing Timelash, The Two Doctors, Mark of the Rani, and the worse elements of The Twin Dilemma upon him; he should not be blamed for these any more than Cartmel should be blamed for Time and the Rani and Silver Nemesis, or Davies should be blamed for Fear Her, and Saward should get as much credit for Enlightenment as he should be blamed for Arc of Infinity. Saward, without JNT foisting terrible stories and an actor he hated upon him, could have easily been a fairly good script-editor, though certainly no Whitaker, Adams, or Cartmel.
The only real comparison to Chibnall, in my opinion, is John Peel.
March 13, 2024 @ 11:02 pm
Indeed nobody should be blamed for Silver Nemesis, given that it is quite good.
March 14, 2024 @ 1:41 pm
Indeed, Silver Nemesis’s main flaw is that it is a slightly less good version of the story they did a month earlier. If Rememberance of the Daleks had aired in a different season, Silver Nemesis would probably be remembered more as the second-best example of Doctor Who’s traditional “Big Name Classic Monster Tries To Steal Ancient Time Lord Super Weapon The Doctor Hid On Earth A Long Time Ago” story.
March 14, 2024 @ 6:26 am
And let’s not forget that Cartmel, unlike Saward, had the advantage of fewer stories per season to edit, JNT in checking-out mode, and not having to deal with Ian Levine. Heck, Bidmead didn’t have to deal with Levine and he answered to Barry Letts rather than JNT. So let’s just say that while Saward had his faults and was promoted prematurely, he wasn’t subjected to the same pressures as other script editors of 80s Who were.
March 15, 2024 @ 11:28 am
I’d argue that Cartmel was also promoted prematurely. While he was (at least by Season 25) quite good at the more charismatic elements of scriptwriting, he had issues with some more technical aspects, most notably judging the length of scripts before filming, and I suspect that 1992 Cartmel would have been substantially better than 1988 Cartmel. (Cat’s Cradle Warhead was certainly a work of genius, IMO.)
March 15, 2024 @ 5:35 pm
For my part I don’t blame Saward for having bad stories foisted upon him, or not finding the casting of Colin Baker to his taste.
I absolutely blame him for his reaction to that situation. A professional script editor would pull his socks up and make the best of the situation – seeking to squeeze the best out of the bad scripts, to support the chosen aesthetic direction of the producer despite not agreeing with it, and doing what was possible to support the present Doctor in the role despite any reservations.
Instead, Saward has all but admitted to sandbagging the show. And he gave as good as he got when it came to penning substandard stories. And he has continued to pointlessly snipe at Colin Baker to this day, even after the audios have shown what Colin can do when he doesn’t have the albatross around his neck of a core production staff member who fundamentally doesn’t believe he can do the job.
March 13, 2024 @ 4:07 pm
This episode completes the circle to Open Air; Chibnall has waited 30 years to create a version of Doctor Who that channels most closely the one he went on BBC1 to criticise. The mind boggles
March 13, 2024 @ 11:15 pm
Coming up with names for The Battle of Rancid Avocados has been immensely more fun than watching most of these episodes.
March 15, 2024 @ 4:56 pm
Look, I’m with you on all this “Battle of Randall and Hopkirk” stuff. But since when we decide “The Wedding of River Song” was some sort of omnishambles? I did not get that memo.
More seriously, if I can even use that term on a day where twitter is exploding because of the new series will “drop” at midnight, it’s pretty anachronistic to talk about a series finale in Classic Who. Armageddon Factor, I suppose. Those episodes which coincided with change of Doctor. I remember “The Daemons” or “Invasion of Time” as just the last episode in this series.
All that said, the Bottle of Rusks and Biscuits is not good.
March 17, 2024 @ 11:16 am
Highly recommend checking out the script for this episode, if you can stand it. The version on the BBC Script Lab (link below) is an absolute mess. Sentences stop halfway through, everyone’s talking like a robot and some lines are so full of misspellings and missing words that they become completely inscrutable. The whole thing is a mess, even more so than the obviously flawed first draft for The Pilot, also available on the Script Lab website.
According to the 2022 interview Elizabeth references above Chibnall called this script a first draft, but the script on Script Lab made it to Yellow Revisions. The idea that multiple revisions were made and yet lines like “Ranskoor Av Kolos is Stenza’s home planet so how can that be Tim Shaw?” or “Then what us he here?” still made it through is just astonishing. Like, ok, I get that a second draft and a revised first draft are two different things, but surely clarifying what a line is supposed to be for the sake of your actors/director/editor should still be a priority, right? What happened here??
(Link to Script Lab: https://www.bbc.co.uk/writers/documents/doctor-who-s11-ep10-uk-versionwip.pdf)
March 17, 2024 @ 11:38 am
la samah allah, I think that Chibnall might actually have outsourced the writing of this episode to a chatbot.
March 25, 2024 @ 9:38 am
I’d also love to hear more about the theories regarding why this script feels like a first draft – I keep hearing rumours about behind the scenes chaos during the Chibnall era, or fights between him having an actual vision and the BBC enforcing a completely different version of the show on him, but these are never that well sourced or attributed and also end up resembling hearsay or gossip.
Where is the information coming from exactly?
March 26, 2024 @ 6:35 pm
Chibnall said in his big 2022 “leaving the show” DWM interview that this story was more or less a first draft because he’d spent lots of time polishing up / editing guest writers’ stories that season so didn’t have enough time to work on the finale. However, the draft uploaded to the BBC Writers’ Room Script Library indicates he must be generalising, because the industry language used there to label the drafts indicated it had already been through several revisions.
As to BTS drama… well, that is mostly going to be industry gossip at this point, because those involved are unlikely to come out and actively document what went wrong. We have a few concrete sources here and there, such as Wayne Yip opening up to fans at a convention about his frustrations filming “Resolution”, or Sacha Dhawan’s anecdote about not being given any prep time for his Tecteun monologue.
March 25, 2024 @ 7:36 pm
After a very long think, I believe I’ve found a potential approach to the Chibnall years.
To paraphrase from somewhere: About 8 years ago, on a nameless program that no longer exists, televisual evolution went up a blind alley. Natural programmatic selection turned back on itself, and a series evolved which prospered by absorbing the energy wavelengths of entertainment itself. It ate stories, all stories, including those which it produced itself.
The natural outcome of this procedure was the series entirely consuming itself, eating away most of the universe but in a fashion which rendered that destruction meaningless, having Time itself appear to say something completely meaningless, and then concluding with three stories. The first keeps going wrong but somehow manages enough revisions to work, if only just. The second claims to be a story about two things, one of which barely appears and the other of which appears but fails to function in an “even the effects don’t fail entertainingly any more” kind of way. And in the last, the old show must die, and the new show discovers to its inexpressible joy that it has never existed.
Fortunately, in 2023, a visionary producer/writer by the name of Russell T. Davies somehow managed to restart a television program with a rich history which looked like it would never be able to continue.