I Thought It Would Hurt Me, And I Was Right (Spyfall)
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. They’re bundled into a car, which assassinates its driver as its satnav proceeds to give the instruction “in five seconds, die” and the car begins to drive backwards on the motorway.
At which point the Doctor—who has at literally no point been driving the car—exclaims, “someone’s controlling this car, and it isn’t me!” and you abruptly remember that you’re watching a Chris Chibnall script. And this is scarcely the only moment where the Doctor’s engagement with the story is odd. The decision to continue putting her in three-quarter length trousers even when she’s doing her tuxedoed James Bond cosplay emphasizes the degree to which she feels like a child dressing up as the Doctor instead of like an immortal time traveller. And this isn’t helped at all by the degree to which she is portrayed as shockingly and comprehensively inept. Just consider the sequence where, moments after being informed that the Kaasavin are from “far beyond” and seek to take “this universe,” she is perplexed to find that their language does not correspond to any known language in the universe, somehow failing to make the most basic leap.
Language is clearly important here. It’s repeatedly stressed that the Kasaavin—OK, no, I refuse to keep checking where that double a goes, hang on. It’s repeatedly stressed that the Shitty Vardans are focused on moments key to the development of computers, while the Doctor notes that “it’s all in the patterns. Steganography, encrypted code, attacks on intelligence agents.” Which is to say that we’re actively pushed to look for the message hidden within the vast and sprawling web of signification—a conspiratorial secret.
Taken as a whole, this web can only be understood in terms of the Master. The first episode, in particular, is structured around his reveal. It’s a machine for setting up Sacha Dhawan as the Master. Being a machine constructed by Chibnall it does, of course, not actually work. Most glaringly, its key reveal—the Doctor catching the Master in a lie—is a lie about information we’ve never been given before. It’s a wholly arbitrary moment—a point at which the light switch is thrown between “the Doctor is ignorant” and “the Doctor understands” by nothing save authorial fiat.
Speaking of authorial fiat… we have an episode in which the Master is in control of the overall structure while the Doctor is not merely on the back foot but seemingly removed from the occasion, so diminished she’s now left to lag behind the audience in figuring things out. In which case it’s interesting that the Master is initially presented as a paranoid and conspiratorial fanboy. It is, of course, painfully on the nose, especially when the bad fan becomes the puppetmaster who lords the fact that “everything you know is a lie” over Doctor and audience alike.
But, of course, we have to balance that against the knowledge of where all of this is going. The grand secret that the Master lords over the Doctor is going to be a damp squib. More to the point, however, even strictly in terms of this story the Master’s scheme is an incoherent nothing, hinging on a betrayal of the Shitty Vardans that seems only to exist so that the Master can betray someone. His scheme has no attachment to his nominal motivation—having found out that the Doctor is secretly the progenitor of the entire Time Lords he decides on an entirely unrelated scheme in which he attempts to dispatch the Doctor at an arbitrary midway point without telling her anything about it. Barton’s presence in it seems to exist purely because the Master decided to infiltrate MI6 as a weirdo conspiracy theorist instead of just becoming a tech billionaire himself—he’s ultimately so superfluous that the story doesn’t bother to have defeated him, or really given him anything to do besides be an excuse to cast Lenny Henry.
All of which was, at the time, made even more frustrating by the fact that Chibnall’s big season premiere launching idea was to bring back the Master, a villain we’d not seen in exactly one season. More to the point, however, when we’d last seen the character it was in a version that even Moffat’s detractors largely admitted was a pretty good idea. Missy was the most clear cut triumph of late Moffat—something you could point to as the one time that the oft problematic character of the Master actually worked. And Chibnall’s big idea was to roll the character back to John Simm by way of Anthony Ainley. The problem isn’t Dhawan per se, although he seems to have embraced something akin to the Graham Crowden/Richard Briers approach of savoring the opportunity to engage in unchecked scenery consumption. The problem is that this seems to legitimately be the extent of Chibnall’s vision for the role. It’s sublime in its pointlessness, a character who serves only to unfix a longstanding narrative problem. At no point does he work. Worse, at no point does he even try to.
But then, that’s the Chibnall era. At no point does any of it work, and at no point does it even feel like it’s trying to. It’s very nearly impossible to consistently write two thousand words about these stories, and outright impossible to do it at a post a week. But of course it is. This is, after all, a story that, read closely, appears to be about the complete breakdown of meaning at the hands of a Chris Chibnall stand-in. It’s a story in which we are literally told that there’s a hidden secret meaning behind everything only to discover that it’s all completely meaningless and doesn’t go anywhere at all. Of course it’s difficult to write about.
In some ways, this is a mercy. Certainly the fact that the series seems to be, if not embracing, at least attaining an entirely nihilistic concept of communication makes things like “Kerblam!” or the Doctor’s absolutely astonishing decision here to expose the Master as a person of color to the literal Nazis easier to swallow, or her mindwipe of Ada Lovelace, or the casualness with which she leaves Noor Inayat Khan to her fate. There is, after all, no morality to be had in a narrative that lacks all notion of meaning. It’s literally insignificant.
In the wake of this revelation, watching the show becomes a sort of second order soap opera spent watching the actors attempt to cope with the growing realization that they are trapped in a show that cannot be said to be about anything other than its showrunner’s spectacular public collapse as a major and respected television writer. Jodie Whittaker is, alas, the least interesting figure here, seeming comfortable in the role in much the same way that her Doctor is comfortable in those stupid, infantilizing three-quarter length tuxedo pants. Whatever one might think of her performance, she is undoubtedly perfect for this role in this iteration of the show because she legitimately does not seem to have the slightest clue that she is acting in a complete and utter piece of dogshit.
Tosin Cole seems on the opposite extreme, painfully aware that his only role in this story is to be an incompetent idiot. When he comes out to talk to Yaz late in the first episode he seems genuinely exhausted by the prospect of playing out a scene in which his only role is to listen to some tell-don’t-show sci-fi dialogue and then to vow to protect the girl. You imagine him in his trailer marking off the days on the wall.
Bradley Walsh, meanwhile, has been around the block enough to be unphased. Like Lenny Henry and Stephen Fry, this is not his first time in a piece of shit, and so he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work not being the problem, correctly figuring that, when it’s all listed out on his Wikipedia page, two years doing this will serve as a charming capstone to the career of a television legend regardless of quality. If anything he seems to find a perverse enjoyment in looking at things like “dance around with laser shoes” and figuring out how to make it into a highlight of the episode.
As for Mandip Gill, she has in many ways the most interesting evolution. A noted in the Witchfinders essay, she spends Series 11 flagrantly being the person most invested in being impressive, recognizing that if she nails this she’s set for life. But by Series 12, there’s a clear sense that she’s realized there is no nailing this, and that nobody is emerging from this project looking good. And yet there’s little sense that this changes her basic approach so much as it creates a larger context of despair around her efforts, as if she is defiantly trying to stave off the nervous breakdown that has infected every other aspect of the show.
Perversely, it’s the first time in the Chibnall era you’re left with any curiosity about what could possibly happen next.
July 8, 2024 @ 11:02 am
This feels like the moment the mainstream press started turning on the show; that Guardian “Too Woke? Nope.” article dropped shortly after this story went out.
July 8, 2024 @ 12:54 pm
“And Chibnall’s big idea was to roll the character back to John Simm by way of Anthony Ainley.”
That is grossly unfair to Anthony Ainley, whose Master comes off as subtle and nuanced compared to Dewan’s performance, which takes everything I hated about Simm’s Master and cranks it up to 11.
You know, sitting here reading this, I just had an epiphany about how Dewan’s Master could have actually worked. Instead of the Master being consumed by hatred of the Doctor because of some Timeless Child bullshit, have it be a continuation of Missy referring to Capaldi’s Doctor as her “boyfriend.” This time, the Doctor is the female and the Master is a stalkerish male who genocided Gallifrey in a twisted desire to take revenge on the Timelords for what they did to “his girlfriend.” And the Master’s insane plan to kill the Doctor by “becoming” her in “The Power of the Doctor” is the result of her definitively rejecting him romantically or at least placing him firmly in the “Frenemy Zone” at the end of “Timeless Children.” I could see RTD making that work, but not the hapless Chibnall. (Moffatt would be iffy with that given his personal baggage.)
RE the mind-raping of Ada Lovelace. It was just as appalling as when Tennant’s Doctor did it to Donna. I genuinely wonder if RTD saw this, had a realization of just how morally wrong the Donna resolution was, and resolved then and there to come back just to undo Donna’s mind-wipe.
RE Noor Inayat Khan. Saying “Good Luck” to someone you KNOW will die in a Nazi concentration camp was the moment I began to wonder if Whittaker’s Doctor was a sociopath.
RE turning the Master over to the Nazis. Oddly, this didn’t bother me as much as it did Elizabeth or others. Yes, she was turning a POC over to Nazis, but it was a POC who had been /working as a Nazi while magically passing as white/. God knows how many innocent people he executed while he was cosplaying as a Gestapo while waiting around for the Doctor to show up. And anyway, it’s the Master. Delgado orchestrated world-conquest schemes from /inside a prison./ I suspect escaping the Nazis was only slightly more challenging than escaping a Girl Scout troop.
RE the whole “O” thing. I loved Missy for many reasons, but by far the biggest was that in her every appearance, she was just “Missy.” For once, she abandoned the Master’s bizarre obsession with method acting a disguise for months or even years (even when no one was around to watch him–I’m looking at you, Khalid from “Time-Flight”) just so he could reveal his true identity at a dramatic moment. I honestly think the Master built his entire concept for “O” around being able to make a “Spy Master” pun at a dramatic moment. Of course, the worst was still Ainley in “Mark of the Rani,” when he disguised himself as a scarecrow and hung himself on a post in a field just so that he could watch the Doctor and Peri walk by while completely ignoring him.
July 8, 2024 @ 1:23 pm
“And the Master’s insane plan to kill the Doctor by “becoming” her in “The Power of the Doctor” is the result of her definitively rejecting him romantically or at least placing him firmly in the “Frenemy Zone” at the end of “Timeless Children.””
or romantic desire + gender dysphoria after being “detransitioned” from Missy. the ultimate “do i wanna be her or with her”
July 8, 2024 @ 1:44 pm
I thought about Chris Chibnall trying to do a storyline about gender dysphoria with any semblance of sensitivity or intelligence and nearly made myself sick.
July 9, 2024 @ 1:56 am
“RE the mind-raping of Ada Lovelace. It was just as appalling as when Tennant’s Doctor did it to Donna. I genuinely wonder if RTD saw this, had a realization of just how morally wrong the Donna resolution was, and resolved then and there to come back just to undo Donna’s mind-wipe.”
I think that if RTD didn’t realize that mind wiping of Donna was morally wrong, he wouldn’t have written Donna’s family’s reacting to it in such a negative way. Even the doctor was distraught that they had to do it.
A lot could be drawn from how the three modern eras have handled their respective mind wipes.
RTD – A tragic lesser of two evils and an end to Donna’s time with the Doctor. The Doctor still helps Donna from afar as penance for what they had to do to her.
Moffat – A twist on the previous mind wipe’s premise. Now the companion has agency in the event, neither Clara or the Doctor know who will lose their memories and the entire episode teases the audience with this uncertain outcome for drama.
Chibnall – Mind wipes two guest characters back to back in a single episode and acts like this has always been the norm when meeting historical characters.
July 9, 2024 @ 6:51 am
“Chibnall – Mind wipes two guest characters back to back in a single episode and acts like this has always been the norm when meeting historical characters.”
What has always struck me is that, two episodes after this, we have two more historical guest characters who both learn that aliens exist and they get to keep their memories. It’s an odd inconsistence and it particularly stinks when you realize that it’s two historical women who get mindwiped in this, but the two historical men later face no such consequence.
July 9, 2024 @ 9:32 am
Especially given how big a deal in that episode it is that one of these two men is very prone to exploiting and stealing other people’s ideas like a magpie. If anyone would palm some future tech and use what they saw of the SF world to get ahead and change history in doing so, surely it’s Edison!
July 11, 2024 @ 2:23 am
Oh yeah, thank you for reminding me that we have an episode coming up that is ostensibly “Doctor Who meets Nicola Tesla” that somehow inexplicably makes /Thomas Edison/ the most likeable and sensible character, while also making a case for the positive aspects of predatory capitalism.
July 9, 2024 @ 9:37 am
“Yes, she was turning a POC over to Nazis, but it was a POC who had been /working as a Nazi while magically passing as white/.“
The hilariously stupid thing about this is that by dobbing in the disguised-as-white-Nazi Dhawan as a British agent but also simultaneously deactivating his filter that allows him to pass as a white Aryan, the Doctor should actually have just ensured that Dhawan no longer resembles the guy the Nazis are looking for.
“RE Noor Inayat Khan. Saying “Good Luck” to someone you KNOW will die in a Nazi concentration camp was the moment I began to wonder if Whittaker’s Doctor was a sociopath.“
Weep for the lost edit of this episode that might’ve been, in which they actually scripted and filmed Noor Inayat Khan’s execution at Dachau. Cut before broadcast, but that is a real scene the people making this show almost put out on television.
July 9, 2024 @ 1:08 pm
The funny thing is, I feel like Dhawan’s Master is actually a pretty good dark mirror of the Eleventh Doctor, from his sense of style to his manic energy. Maybe he’s a pre-Missy incarnation who wanted to kill Eleven but accidentally crossed paths with Thirteen… He’s clearly not meant to be but at least that would make more sense.
July 11, 2024 @ 2:25 am
I would honestly like very much to believe that Dawan’s Master is actually a pre-Derek Jacobi Master so that I don’t get depressed over Missy the Magnificent turning into … this.
July 10, 2024 @ 8:38 pm
I’ve just watched Mark Of The Rani for the first time since broadcast. That bit is mind-boggling (as is much of the rest of it). How long exactly has The Master been standing in the field disguised as a scarecrow? Why? Presumably just for the satisfaction of not being spotted by the Doctor , and being able to let out a villainous chuckle. The story reminds me of 1960s Batman but without the intentional comedy.
July 8, 2024 @ 1:41 pm
A story built around Noor Inayat Khan would have been fantastic, instead she is just basically a cameo in a Master run around. What a waste.
July 9, 2024 @ 9:40 am
If the truism is that art speaks for itself, then the fact that on the DVD commentary for “Spyfall Part Two”, there is an entire ELEVEN MINUTES of silence in which Chibnall, Whittaker, and guest actor Sylvie Briggs don’t utter a single syllable really says everything that needs to be said.
(For those interested, yes, it is the diciest sequence of 13 and the Master meeting atop the Eiffel Tower and the whole ‘handing him over to the Nazis’ stuff).
July 9, 2024 @ 11:02 am
Chibnall’s writing is bad in many ways but one of his most perplexing aspects is the complete lack of character economy. A large TARDIS crew with nothing to do. Multiple side characters who perform the same plot function. Villains acting in pairs. It’s like he just can’t stop creating new characters.
July 10, 2024 @ 8:33 pm
A tribute to the Davison years perhaps, where despite having three companions they would then have a guest star such as Nerys Hughes or Liza Goddard act as a substitute companion for the duration of the story while actual companions have a nap in the TARDIS or crawl around in ventilation ducts.
July 9, 2024 @ 11:25 am
I think it’s another example of Chibnall having a solid grounding on what the eras of Doctor Who he likes DID but little understanding of why they worked. Classic Who had large casts and a lot of redundancy, because they had a tight schedule and were spreading the story out over a month and a half. Chibnall is thinking about how back in the old days, the Doctor and company would have to deal with the Master, AND with the aliens the Master was working for, AND the duplicitous lieutenant who was going to backstab the sympathetic leader alien after he’d seen the error of his ways, AND the Doctor would get locked in a room and have to escape three times AND there would be a companion who disappeared for half the story so the actor could take a vacation, and he isn’t thinking about the fact that those things all filled three and a half hours of television, and neither home recording nor the internet existed so half the audience had only fuzzy memories of the beginning of the story by the time they got to the end.
July 9, 2024 @ 4:55 pm
There’s a fascinating ineptness to Spyfall, in that it keeps setting up these vast ideas linking modern-day espionage to the history of computers and encryption throughout centuries as if it’s building to something marginally effective, some thesis on the surveillance state or how governments can condone horrors in the vague ideal of ‘security’. But then nothing ever resolves, there’s no building of ideas, simply a presentation of disparate nuggets of thematic potential left entirely unexplored. Never has a script been stuffed with so much and done so little to craft any coherent narrative.
A probably related fact is that I’ve literally never seen a single person in the last 4 years ever even mention the actual resolution of the Kasaavin plot, which is that they have this magic sculpture thingy in both the Victorian era and present which acts a McGuffin to let them come through to our universe (I think), and the Doctor… fiddles with it offscreen so that it backfires. We’re never given any history to this magic silver sculpture or why it’s in any way tied to electric inter-dimensional shadow beings, it just exists. The resolution is such a mind-wrenching non-event that we don’t see it happen.
The story doesn’t even have that ‘part 1 illusion of quality’ of something like Before the Flood, which on first viewing felt like it could go somewhere. Here it’s just tired Bond action scenes and spy plots that don’t add up.
Of course there is also Gallifrey, the fate of which is probably best left discussed for the finale. It’s shocking in how not shocking it is, a rote, eye-roll inducing moment of incredulity that leaves one wondering why they even bothered.
July 10, 2024 @ 9:04 am
Dhawan’s Master is tricky for me because I find his performance genuinely hard to watch, but that may be the point? He’s constantly bristling with this manic energy but how it’s expressed is, for lack of a better phrase, cringey as fuck. His first proper scene in the plane demonstrates this well- the little exhale after revealing his name, the awkward way he bends over and starts clapping his hands, the forced laugh, it’s all genuinely uncomfortable to watch. Ultimately the mania that defines the new series Masters is there with none of the charisma. All ham, no camp. Like watching a half-rate Joker impression, it’s try-hard nature is vaguely embarrassing.
But even large swathes of this blog would agree that “vaguely embarrassing” is an accurate description of the Master, and if anything it’s an understated description of the Chibnall era at large. What’s more, an aspect of the Chibnall era that goes curiously under-explored on this blog is Chibnall’s regression to a cheap impression of RTD’s DW, which ties nicely into El’s description of Dhawan as “John Simm via Antony Ainley”. And of course, Dhawan’s commitment to making big choices that don’t work reflects the trajectory of the show till POTD.
With all that in mind Dhawan’s performance is an honest representation of the current state of Doctor Who and even of the kind of character The Master has always been. It’s the embodiment of the show’s failures made monstrous, fittingly demonstrated via the Doctor’s own dark shadow. In that regard it’s terribly effective. I hate watching it, but it made me feel something, which lowkey makes it the best part of Chibnall’s tenure.
All of which is my cope explanation of how an actor I quite like could have delivered such a heinous performance.
July 12, 2024 @ 3:01 pm
I found Dhawan’s scenery-chewing reasonably entertaining, in the same way (though not to the same extent) that I found Simm’s scenery-chewing reasonably entertaining. If they had at some point revealed that he was a pre-Gomez incarnation, I might even think of him as one of the better aspects of the Chibnall era (a low bar, yes). It is the pointless destruction of what Gomez and Moffat did with the character that I can’t stand.
July 10, 2024 @ 8:45 pm
The single thing that irritates me about Spyfall the most is actually the title, just an utterly rubbish pun (slightly less bad than Arachnids In The UK though) that’s just there to say “Look, we’re doing a Bond pastiche – please watch”.
I like the idea of the Master as an obsessive Doctor Who fan, I thought that’s where they were going with O at first. Better than ther other thing he is this season which seems to be continuity announcer, appearing at the end of episodes urging us to watch next week because “Everything is going to change”
July 11, 2024 @ 5:59 am
It’s an incredibly lazy pun but the thing that pushes it into irritating for me is that it’s a spy pun on the name of a James Bond film, not a spy pun on the name of a Doctor Who episode. Like it would be OK to release an actual Bond parody film called Spyfall but here it’s just weirdly orthogonal. Far better would have been to start with one of those aphorisms that sounds like a Fleming title and bend it into a Doctor Who title.
July 11, 2024 @ 6:52 am
Chibnall could’ve literally used one of his trademark Scrabble-bag planet names in a “From ____ With Love” format and we’d all have got the joke just as easily.
July 15, 2024 @ 12:14 pm
You Only Live 13 Times Unless You Live Longer For Random Plot Reasons
July 26, 2024 @ 10:57 am
“From Gallifrey with Love” was right there.
July 15, 2024 @ 12:29 pm
You Only Live 13 Times Unless You Live Longer For Random Plot Reasons
July 15, 2024 @ 5:55 pm
I like that the episode begins with the show reminding the audience of each character’s gimmick. Graham is cancer man, Ryan is playing basketball, Yaz is a cop. The way the opening is written really highlights just how little Chibnall ever cared about any of 13’s “fam”. They’re plot elements with checkboxes in place of personality. Also, it’s been commented before, but it’s batshit insane that 2 of Ryan’s main character traits are “my black dad abandoned me” and “I want to be good at basketball.” Like, jesus Chibnall.
Honestly, I kind of was fond of the first episode. Spy Thriller NuWho was actually kinda fun, and I am rather fond of the motorcycle chase. Obviously the dialogue was still terrible, but it had some novelty and it was aesthetically pleasing at points. I can’t think of another DW episode where they do the classic “infiltrate a high society party” plot. The closest I’ve got is the Lazarus experiment, which had a lot less fun with the premise.
Of course, after getting a solid 6.5/10 first episode (a high for Chibnall), the second episode throws it all away and becomes a disorganized romp without any solid structure. The second episode throws a bunch of well treaded tropes and historical facts at you, and relies on your recognition of them to bolster its quality. At the very least, the James Bond gadgets was one of the few times I think Chibnall actually succeeded at basic writing. They are established early in the story, and then you see them later on! Wow! Impressive writing for Chibnall, who usually diarrheas exposition out only when the plot needs it.
I think people hyperfixate on the Doctor revealing the master’s race to her as a low point of 13’s run. Imma be real, both RTD and Moffat are absolutely capable of writing that moment. It’s stupid, and ill considered, but ultimately it’s not really a transgression by the character, just a oversight from a writer we already knew was dumb as bricks. I do find the “working with Nazis is low even for you” line to be really weird—the master regularly commits genocides on massive scales! Nazis obviously are real and the master isn’t, but that line just sticks out so bad.
July 15, 2024 @ 9:45 pm
Working with the Nazis is a new low for the Master because the Master traditionally had enough style and panache to team up with Clever Nazi Metaphors. Teaming up with “Just the Literal Nazis” is just so boring and mundane and cliche. “Turns out it was the literal Nazis” isn’t a Doctor Who plot, it’s a Tomorrow People plot.
July 18, 2024 @ 10:33 am
I guess Unicorn and the Wasp, Rise of the Cybermen, and Husbands of River Song all sort of do the high-society-party-infiltration gambit, with varying degrees of focus and with varying cover stories (e.g. in one of them they pose as staff).
A rare nice thing I can say about Spyfall is that Akinola’s Bondesque score for Part 1 is quite fun, particularly the remix of 13’s theme when they arrive at Daniel Barton vineyard/estate.
August 8, 2024 @ 6:07 am
Now it’s just reads like amphetamine psychosis
August 27, 2024 @ 10:26 am
A good episode would have set up that Master bit. Maybe Daniel Barton, the VOR guy, Googled/Vored him and found out. Maybe the Kasaavin told him when he wanted information. They had a way to tell the audience right there and didn’t use it.
September 12, 2024 @ 4:51 am
It’s still wild to me that Spyfall was potentially going to air on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
https://radiofreeskaro.com/2023/02/28/radio-free-skaro-interview-with-chris-chibnall-transcript/