Like an Old Ruin (The Power of the Doctor)
And so, at last, we come to the end of the Whittaker era of TARDIS Eruditorum. In the wake of recent events, I’d like to stop and offer a special and deep thanks to my Patreon backers, who allow me the security and flexibility to keep doing what I do in spite of everything. This is all absolutely terrifying and dismaying, but it would be infinitely more so without them. I’ve got a few things that’ll go up on the site over the next few weeks, and obviously Joy to the World at Christmas, but I’ll mostly be over there until Last War in Albion returns in 2025.
It’s October 23rd, 2022. Sam Smith and Kim Petras are at number one with “Unholy.” Beyonce, Lewis Capaldi, Stormzy, and Nicki Minaj also chart. In news… fuck, man, there’s been a lot. We’re two days out from the end of the Liz Truss vs Lettuce race. Let’s just leave it there and move on to the entry.
Two months after Legend of the Sea Devils, while Penn and I are at a comics convention in North Carolina, I get the call that my father has had another stroke. The news meanders back and forth between bad and worse over six weeks until, at the end of August, he finally passes. I never go and see him, deciding that my week taking care of him in the spring is a better last memory than him stuck full of tubes, no longer even there enough to straightforwardly recognize the people around him. My mother doesn’t begrudge me this decision, recognizing, I think, that her and my sister’s need for hope is not compatible with my need to accept the inevitable and start processing it. A week later the Queen dies, and I turn forty.
Unsurprisingly, I crash into one of the worst and longest burnouts of my life and career. The handful of things I do write are stuff I’m proud of—a sprawling mystical poem called Ithaca a Saga (which I’m actually posting next week) and a blistering (affectionate) review of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, which, perversely, Penn and I listen to in the car on the way down to bury my father. But everything else just craters. The novel I’m writing dies on the page. The fourth volume of Last War in Albion stalls out completely (a lucky break in hindsight, but agonizing and humiliating at the time). Leaning into the midlife crisis vibe, I indulge in a complete wardrobe refresh, ditching nearly everything I own in favor of a futch-leaning aesthetic based primarily around jackets.
By the time the Chibnall era limps over the finish line I’m in New York to give a talk at NYU about Neoreaction a Basilisk. I get in shortly after this finishes airing, pulling out my phone as we check into the hotel to see if it’s Gatwa or Tennant. I don’t actually get around to watching until late that night, after we get back from a nice dinner with Christine.
It’s just me, Penn, and Anna again, my wife once more electing to stay home. Two months after that—the day after Christmas and the first proper Davies trailer, confirming Beep the Meep, in fact—I tell her I want a divorce. Technically that’s past the end of the Chibnall era, but it’s hard not to view it all as one thing, so that the miserable wreckage of Doctor Who and my personal life can run in a nice symbolically rich parallel. Narrative collapse is a bitch.
It’s funny how we tell these stories. In setting this up over the last few essays I’ve put all the focus on myself, highlighting the way I let my relationship with Penn supersede the one with my wife. And that’s true—Penn came into my day to day life, our relationship quickly became more central to it than the one with her, and over the next three and a half years it drove a gradual wedge between us until I asked her for a divorce. But that’s not the only way I can tell that story. For one thing, I could have framed it in the terms that actually mattered more to me—the experience of falling into a relationship of such comprehensive compatibility and emotional intimacy that we’re both forced to accept that soulmates are actually a thing that exist. Ugh.
But even in talking about the divorce, I could have focused on the decade of emotional abuse I endured, and make it clear that the relationship was untenable long before Penn moved to Ithaca. I could offer vivid and poignant images, like how, when she did my hormone injections, she always just seethed with tangible annoyance at being bothered with the task, and I spent years thinking I was an absolute wuss about needles until I had Penn do them on the trip to England we took that November, and realized that no, it was just that I was constantly tense in the face of her unceasing resentment for being asked to help. Hell, I could let slip that a few months after the split she out of nowhere unfriended Christine on Facebook—her literal fucking daughter, who she adopted right alongside me.
But no. I told it so I could be the villain of the piece. I mean, shit, I even went out of my way to emphasize that I asked for a divorce the day after Christmas, which is true, but also a ridiculously selective detail that gives a massively misleading picture of what went down. Why is that? I mean, on one level that’s a question for my therapist, not my favorite TV show, and is closely related to questions like “why did I stay in an abusive marriage for a decade.” Self hatred is a hell of a drug. But what I really mean by that question is why TARDIS Eruditorum’s longstanding autobiographical strand wanted to be written this way. Why, for instance, did I do the Praxeus essay, which, for all that I picked a justifiable target that nobody was going to get too mad at me about, was still an act of vicious bullying? What compelled me to take this massive heel turn?
I don’t actually have a ready to go answer on that. There’s not been some sort of big master plan where I’d pull back the curtain at the end; I’m figuring this essay out as I write it. The honest truth is that when I sat down to write the Spyfall essay after taking a ten month break following The Battle of Rusty Old Corkscrews, I just sort of went with vibes. I knew I’d have the pandemic lurking through Series Twelve, and I figured “OK, the Chibnall era and my life fall apart together, let’s go with it.” It only now occurs to me that the divorce itself happened in that gap—The Battle of Rinky-Dink Crullers posted to Patreon two weeks before my father’s second stroke, and the resultant hiatus was part and parcel of my burnout. So any explanation I give for this is going to come down to “I was deeply not OK when I was making these decisions.”
Inasmuch as there’s more than that, I think it comes down to rhetorical position. This obviously isn’t the first era of Doctor Who I’ve had an antagonistic relationship with. But the previous instances were mostly low stakes. The Pertwee era (which I ultimately came around on) and the Colin Baker era (which I didn’t) were both history by the time I knew the show existed. The McGann era was more vexed, but ultimately the only bit I actually had strong feelings about was TV Movie; the rest was just stuff I hadn’t cared about at the time, and mostly exceeded those non-existent expectations when I revisited it. None of them were all that hard to write about—before this I think the hardest stretch of the blog was actually Davison. But more to the point, they were all eras I got to dislike as a fan.
That’s not really what I was anymore in 2018. Doctor Who isn’t just a TV show I’ve loved since childhood; it’s my career. One of the straplines on the site is “a magical ritual to pay our rent,” and like all the straplines it’s a joke, but like any joke there’s a truth to it, which is that writing this blog transformed my life. I went from being a failed academic to someone who can keep myself afloat on little more than the whims of my graphomania. With one exception—no matter what efforts I’ve ever made to diversify my career and cultivate an audience that’s interested in me more than my subject matter, the fact has always remained that I have to write about Doctor Who if I want to maintain a sufficient audience to survive.
Which meant that these five years were a very different experience for me than they were for any of you. Than they ever could be, really, unless, like Gareth Roberts is still fucking reading. (Ew. Go away. You’re weird.) Simply put, you could stop watching. And, as the comment sections make clear, many of you did. Whereas I was stuck. I still am. I broke my back getting the Boom review out a few months ago when I was out of town and at a Neil Young concert, watching the episode on my phone during the opener. I still couldn’t get it up til Sunday, and the result was that the review that week got a quarter as many comments as any of the other weeks despite being the big Return of Moffat one where my opinions were going to have more demand. There’s quite literally a price to pay if I’m not on the ball with this show. Which is fine. Magic should have a price, and it’s a perfectly fair one.
But it meant that, on an incredibly busy stretch of days, I had to sit around a laptop in a hotel room and watch ninety minutes of television I knew full well I’m wasn’t even going to enjoy. I even went so far as to have Anna set it up so she could connect from the hotel to her desktop back at home and torrent the episode there, since I know better than to count on BitTorrent being unblocked on public wi-fi. I still remember the road trip where I had to stop at multiple places before I found a Panera Bread where I could spend two hours downloading a standard definition version of The Bells of Saint John at speeds that would have hurt during the Napster era. It was the drive back from my honeymoon.
The funny thing is that for all my resentment and all the grumpy-ass tweeting I did on the day, this isn’t that bad, at least when watched in the context of methodically slogging through the Chibnall era. Like, a week after Legend of the Sea Devils and, sure, yes, with the knowledge that it’s the end of this fucking thing and I get to go write about something else now, this is actually fine.
No, really, let’s read redemptively, at least for a moment. We’re past due. Chibnall has long been stuck neurotically reiterating the Nathan-Turner era in various ways. Here, at last, he lucks into reiterating The Five Doctors, and manages to be no worse a Terrence Dicks than Terrence Dicks was when writing The Eight Doctors. Structurally, this is effectively a two-parter bolted together into an omnibus. The first forty-five minutes are the one thing Chibnall has managed to do at all effectively during his tenure: a perpetual rising action, with new elements lobbed in every couple of minutes. There’s seven minutes of Cybermen on a train, then the rapid introduction of Ace, Tegan, and what is obviously the Master, then Dan’s departure at ten minutes, Daleks at twelve, confirmation of the Master at fifteen, the Cyberplanet and the Master’s TARDIS at seventeen, UNIT at twenty, the Master and the Doctor having an initial face-off at twenty-three, Vinder at twenty-eight, the Doctor going to meet the Dalek at thirty-two, the Master breaking out at thirty-four, the Doctor getting captured at thirty-seven, and then the pseudo-cliffhanger of the forced regeneration, with the Master’s “I am the Doctor” at forty-three, squarely in the episode’s center.
None of it is strictly speaking good, but there’s a giddy thrill to most of it. Sure, nobody was sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for the return of Inston-Vee Vinder or Ashad, but the whir of constant incident keeps things from ever feeling like they’re going off the road. The biggest problem actually turns out to be Janet Fielding, whose TERF brainrot appears to have badly reduced her already limited range, so that she simply shout-emotes every line she’s given. But for the most part it’s a gradually mounting sugar rush, and fun in the way that is.
Things threaten to go off the rails once the Doctor regenerates into the Master (which, man, Sacha Dhawan in Whittaker’s costume sure validates RTD’s instinct that having David Tennant wear it would spark a bunch of alarming drag discourse) simply because it’s so blatantly going to get undone in order to have the Doctor do her proper regeneration. With just forty-five minutes left to the era, this makes all of the pacing feel suddenly off. But then, at the forty-eight minute mark, the episode fairly effectively solves all of its problems when David Bradley shows up to play the Third First Doctor. It’s not that this marks some increase in quality—Bradley, in fact, is absolutely awful. But when he’s immediately followed by the surviving classic ones, complete with an entertainingly over this shit Paul McGann, the story decisively becomes something where discussions of “good” and “bad” no longer really apply.
It’s strange that this should be the case. For all that the series hasn’t done a big multi-Doctor story with the classic Doctors, it’s notable that sixty percent of the Doctors here have, in fact, appeared in the modern series, albeit two of them in mini-episodes. More to the point, they don’t even make up the whole list given that Tom Baker’s also appeared. Given that Troughton and Pertwee lack canonical recastings, it’s hard to actually say that nostalgia-based fandom has been poorly served here. And even if they had been, it’s not as though The Power of the Doctor is actually offering the big multi-Doctor extravaganza of their dreams—David Bradley gets three lines for heavens’ sake.
More to the point though, this just doesn’t feel extraordinary the way it did in 1983. Terrence Dicks lined up, if not the entire living history of the show, at least most of it and a Madame Tussauds figure. But that’s not even remotely an option at this point. The pre-80s Doctors are at this point inaccessible due to the ravages of time save for the idiosyncratically recastable First. The new series Doctors, meanwhile, form their own distinct set, at once striking and unsurprising in their omission. So what we have here is what we might call the convention circuit Doctors, or the Big Finish Doctors, or perhaps the Ish Doctors. Which gets at the other real point—none of this is actually remotely rare anymore. We drown in nostalgia. Big Finish alone releases more of it each month than you can reasonably afford.
And yet in spite of this the moment these particular pensioners hit the screen all capacity for serious critical thought departs my brain. Instead I have a sudden desire to talk about the ongoing marginalization of Colin Baker and the fact that he doesn’t get an AI Doctor scene due to lack of companion. (Although man, there’s something decidedly funny in hindsight about the Chibnall era culminating in the Doctor being replaced by a mid AI, a fact I legit hadn’t even remembered when I did The Vanquishers). Or about the way McGann’s refusal to wear the silly robe literalizes his status as a marginal Doctor that doesn’t quite belong to this set, even as he’d seem just as out of place among the new series Doctors. Likewise, even as every rational component of my brain is appalled that they dragged an elderly William Russell onto a film set in the middle of an ongoing pandemic, where he was by all accounts so confused and disoriented that John Bishop spent the whole shoot taking care of him, and all so he could deliver a corny sexist joke, there’s still some primordial fanbrain part of me going “ooh, Ian Chesterton” like a complete fucking twat, just like there’s a part of me staring in bafflement at how Mel got there when she’s supposed to be with Sabalom Glitz in the far future. (And I still want to know how zingos travel through time.)
At this point it’s fair to ask if there’s anything the show could do to actually alienate me once it’s committed to just being a mindless confection of celebration. Is there any point at which I’d finally actually burn out on this? I mean, yes—it’s not like I actually watch all of the Pete McTighe Blu-Ray trailers, though I’ve seen more of them than I care to admit. And we all know where I am on Big Finish. But is there any point at which I’ll actually turn on it? Where the joyous glow of fun will finally give way to serious criticism? Or are past Doctors just a redemptive reading in and of themselves? Leave it to Chibnall to prove that no, they are not.
I should note, first of all, that Sophie Aldred generally does quite well for herself here. It’s not that she’s an actress replete with range. She does better than Fielding on that front too, but the real difference is simply that Aldred is actually trying to make her character likeable, and has the charisma to pull it off. From her first scene investigating the gallery she manages to be charming, and by the time she’s back in the jacket and cracking Beyoncé jokes she’s squarely the highlight of the episode. Chibnall even clearly has some idea how well she’s going to work, because he goes with the absolutely delightful move of pairing her off with Graham, even if the duo gets painfully little screen time.
But then she meets the holo-Doctor. This is already faintly unfortunate, with Sylvester McCoy’s nostalgia version of his Doctor being by some margin the worst of them, with all the brooding nuance of his television performance replaced with Radagastian clowning (consider his nails on chalkboard decision to roll the R in “forced regeneration”). But that’s not even the problem. The problem is that the Doctor fucking lectures her on the fact that it’s never OK to blow things up.
It’s not that this is an especially shocking development from Chris “leaving someone to slowly suffocate is worse than touching a gun” Chibnall. It’s small potatoes compared to Kerblam! But Chibnall fucking up his own era is one thing. Chibnall going back and fucking up the Cartmel era is quite another. Now, of course, this needs to be caged carefully. For one thing, there’s the obvious James M. Cain objection—he hasn’t fucked up the Cartmel era. Ghost Light is still right up there on the shelf, on Blu-Ray, complete with a dopey trailer of Sophie Aldred standing dramatically in front of a window. For another, one has to be sure not to trip into a Levinian “Classic Doctor Who fans are the most repressed minority of the last sixty years” position. But Levine was talking about the fact that he didn’t like the animation they used on The Celestial Toymaker, and I think that’s meaningfully different from gratuitously undercutting the political aesthetics of an era that was largely defined by them.
But maybe that’s just me and my own pathological fanbrain. Levine and Chibnall pay old men money to dress up and act in fan videos, I get paid to write a million words about the show, and we’re all flagrantly idiots for it. But the thing about “it’s never fine to blow stuff up” is just… why bother? Why bring back actors from over thirty years ago to reprise their characters and explain how the ending of an episode that was the 104th most watched thing on British television that week was inappropriate because it advocated for blowing up creepy old houses haunted by evils older than time itself? Who does this serve?
By all appearances the answer is “no one.” A year or so after this aired the BBC quiz show Pointless had a round about the Whittaker era. The idea of Pointless is that they go and ask a hundred people some questions, then pose those questions to the contestants. The goal is to come up with an answer none of the hundred people guessed. The questions here were “name a Jodie Whittaker episode” and “name a cast member of The Power of the Doctor.” For the latter, the viable answers were anyone save for John Bishop, Bradley Walsh, Sacha Dhawan, David Bradley, David Tennant, Peter Davison, and, surprisingly, Sophie Aldred. As for the former, the viable answers were literally any Jodie Whittaker episode. The panel of a hundred people were able to come up with exactly zero answers. Every single episode title eluded them. It’s a stunning marker of just how little impact any of this had.
It’s ironic that this should happen in an episode called The Power of the Doctor, because it seems to confirm that there isn’t any. There’s no substance or content to the Doctor that matters. There’s just a parade of old actors and some monster costumes, and even most of them are forgettable. Sixty years of history are reduced to a weekend at Longleat—and a poorly remembered one at that. And once the old men doing party pieces are sent back to Big Finish and Chibnall is left to try to conclude his era without even the faint glow of old glories to prop him up, it all just crumbles into nothing. The Doctor doesn’t die trying to save anyone. She doesn’t die because of hubris. She dies because the Master pushes the “she dies” button due to reaching the end of the episode. That relationship between the Doctor and Yaz that the show’s been talking about for the past three episodes? It just ends. The Doctor seems to care about Yaz about as much as the Pointless panel did; there’s no explanation for why she leaves, or why the Doctor wants her to. The Doctor just dumps her and wanders off to mutter an old Dennis Potter quote about flowers and turn back into David Tennant, and that’s that.
I hate it.
That’s not news. I’ve been hating it for 65,000 words now. But I said that my heel turn was a rhetorical position, and this is why. Because I don’t just not like the era. I don’t just think it’s bad. I despise it. It makes me angry. The very idea of sitting down to watch it spikes my suicidal ideation. It’s not just the Timeless Child shit, which I’ve already talked about. It’s all of it—every single detail makes my blood boil. I hate the Amazon shilling and the letting Trump go and the fucking cop companion. I hate the intangible sludge color grading and the clunky-ass dialogue and the comprehensive allergy to emotional resolution. Even the perfectly good episodes like Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror or Demons of the Punjab—which is unambiguously a quality episode of Doctor Who that will fit perfectly well in a “one per Doctor” marathon—fundamentally just repulse me because they’re part of this godforsaken era.
But I look at that hatred and I think about that video I mentioned way back in The Woman Who Fell to Earth, with the little kid just exploding with joy because “the new Doctor is a girl.” I think about the conversation that happened in Discord recently where a bunch of people talked about when they started reading TARDIS Eruditorum. A lot of them said it was as teenagers, in high school. That kid’s gotta be around that age now. I imagine her discovering the blog and going to read, only to find thirty-two straight posts trashing the era that excited and delighted her so much. And I just feel like a horrible person. I mean, part of me feels like scoffing that she should get better taste, but honestly I just feel like shit about that too.
Because fundamentally, this isn’t fair of me. Like, I stand by thinking the era is crap, but it’s not crap in the brain-deforming, all-consuming way I think it is. I don’t think it’s actually possible for a TV show to be as crap as I think this is. I’m perfectly aware that it didn’t kill my father or my marriage. I mean, fuck, my father’s first stroke took as much of him away from me as the one that killed him, and my first divorce happened the same weekend, but you don’t see me blaming the David Tennant specials. As for the divorce, sure, the dying months of my marriage played out over this background, but it was also the era where I fell in love with Penn, went to England with him and saw a bunch of Blake paintings in the flesh, and started making comics with him. The era where I was just being emotionally abused by myself, isolated from pretty much anything but an online support network? That was my beloved Capaldi era.
But something doesn’t have to be fair or sane to be real. Like I said, I pretty much had to write about this era. And this was the only way I knew how. You can’t really look past an absolutely pathological hatred of something; that’s what makes it pathological. But at the end of the day, if I’m going to turn on the thing I’ve written a million words about I should at least have the fucking honesty to admit that I’m the villain of the story. I’ve just written a book that consists of nothing save for shitting on a thing that people love. Yes, those people are at best pod people and at worst people with bad taste, but they’re still people. And frankly, the people who spent the Chibnall era chugging the same haterade as me are going to cheer me on no matter how much of a dick I am about it. Hell, they’ll probably just cheer louder. May as well be the villain to the people who care.
Here’s the thing about villains, though: we’re there to be defeated. So if you’re 65,000 words into reading some middle-aged asshole’s sneering takedown of your favorite era of Doctor Who, all I can really say is “come at me bro.” I’ve been top of the heap for Doctor Who criticism for fourteen years now. That’s two entire Tom Baker eras, which is to say too long twice over. So take me down. Write a sprawling, passionate defense of the Chibnall era that makes me look like the washed up old hag I am. Change how we all see it. Advance the discourse beyond this petty, tedious hatred that I’ve been peddling. Believe me, I’ll be the first to share an essay about the Chibnall era that makes me sit up and go “oh, I hadn’t thought of that” if you write it. Or make a YouTube video, I suppose. I think that’s what you kids do now, actually.
Until then, I’ll go watch Doctor Who written by a guy who’s been around since the Virgin New Adventures like a good little fossil.
November 11, 2024 @ 5:41 am
This is one of the most powerful things you’ve ever written, and I’m sorry you had to.
November 11, 2024 @ 6:43 am
This is simultaneously incredibly powerful stuff, as Przemek said, but it also points to the ultimate condemnation of the Chibnall era: that at the end of the day the most meaningful and deep and important and heartfelt thing you can say about it is “it aired during a time in my life when these things happened”, which was something which is always automatically true of any television which airs during our lifetime, up to and including test patterns.
For you, it has those associations with your father and your marriage and that difficult journey. For everyone on the planet, it’s always going to be known as the era that had its last season derailed by COVID, and maybe people’s memories will get fuzzy and those of us who were here will have to spend the rest of our lives telling younger folk that no, series 12 was in the can and aired before the UK went into lockdown, there’s no pandemic alibi for that one.
And one of the things we know about trauma is that it creates associations. People’s PTSD triggers can be extraordinarily specific if a particular sensation is associated with the trauma. Under the right circumstances, even a test pattern can end up provoking a powerful response ever after if it happened to be on when something sufficiently awful happened to us.
Maybe there are folk for whom Chibnall-Who actually resonates and it attains a meaning above and beyond the associations it was inevitably going to accumulate by virtue of airing when it did, and always would have accumulated regardless of what creative decisions actually made it to screen. But it’s going to take one of them to enunciate that.
As it stands, we’re back to the idea of Chibnall fans liking that era of the show specific because it’s a blank slate they can project things onto. Like writing fanfic imagining the inner life of the girl on the BBC test pattern card in my youth. The Rorschach test-like patterns in the title sequence turn out to be the most thematically apt decision of the era.
November 11, 2024 @ 7:57 am
I’ve long fantasized about a piece of writing that captures, through a blend of fact and fiction, the toughest time of my life and the specific traumatic feelings I had in that time period. But the farther away I get from that time the more I realize just how unequipped I am to actually do that – its value is in lashing out, in the imaginary catharsis I’d hope to achieve through doing so. It’s a very tough thing to write – either you do it in the moment, and make it up as you go based on your feelings, or you detach yourself from it enough to put in the effort necessary to make it very good, which requires asking oneself if it’s a story that actually needs telling. Etcetera.
But I still think that kind of writing can be powerful. Certainly just as a reader there’s a catharsis to this entry, to the light at the end of the Chibnall era, to the honesty.
November 11, 2024 @ 8:22 am
Sudden realisation: the Chibnall era is the Empty Child. A figure which has little to say beyond asking a question about origin and parentage which turns out to be ultimately a bit meaningless, helplessly following a blueprint it doesn’t really understand, taking on the superficial appearance of something it knows it ought to resemble without understanding how the component features actually relate to each other, and done better by Steven Moffat.
November 11, 2024 @ 9:35 am
I think this is a good summing up of the episode and the error. The only thing I’m slightly confused about is why Ian’s line is sexist.
The fan impulse thing really resonated when I thought back to how I watched this episode. Frankly I thought it was brilliant! At literally the last minute, Chibnall had turned it around and written a brilliant episode. However, when I rewatched it, it was suddenly bad again. The various fan elements of it had given me a sugar rush that just didn’t hold up on a second watching. I felt the same coming out of the cinema after Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The feeling that it was an amazing film slowly disapating as I realised it had just been cynically engineered to appeal purely and specifically to people like me.
The comments about the little girl also resonated. Earlier this year, I met Jodie Whittaker. She was supporting a local charity and as part of the fundraising, you could pay £15 to get a photo with her and an autograph. I don’t often go to fan events/comic-cons/conventions but this was right on my doorstep so I thought I’d go.
Because I’m not used to the audiences, I was pretty much expecting everyone to be like me; a slowly fattening middle-aged cis white man who was going despite not being a fan of the era because it would be a missed opportunity to meet a Doctor Who, any Doctor Who.
But actually the crowd there were not that type at all. I was the rarity. The rest were teenage girls, effeminate teenage boys with multi-coloured hair nervously clutching Doctor Who books they weren’t allowed to have signed, disabled people, trans people. Marginalised people, frankly. Many in the crowd were absolutely shaking about meeting Whittaker, and she was bloody marvellous at putting them at their ease and chatting to them even though it was clear she was there to represent the charity and not the Doctor Who franchise.
It became clear to me that although you can legitimately look under the bonnet and see the regressive politics of Chris Chibnall and bonkers ideas like starving animals being better than shooting them or that people arguing Amazon are awful should be blown up. You can look at how poorly the episodes hang together and argue, legitimately, that the progressive themes of the era that lost so many racist and misogynistic fans are only as skin-deep as a bit of diversity in its casting. You can argue that it’s poor television.
But Jodie, Mandip, Tosin, Chibnall, the thirteenth Doctor and her era, despite all that, really resonated with people and they are loved as much by their fans as I love other eras of the show. And those fans are people who aren’t mainstream, don’t necessarily fit in with their social groups and don’t even fit in with the archetype of the loser Doctor Who fan in his anorak that the press has long heralded. It made me a little bit ashamed of my cynicism, and gave me a new appreciation of an era that, for all I’ll probably never watch it again, really held a hand out to people who really need it. As it did to me when I was a teenager.
If I feel they have not quite understood the era as well as I have, maybe I’m right or maybe I’m just a patronising old bastard.
November 18, 2024 @ 3:42 am
“The only thing I’m slightly confused about is why Ian’s line is sexist.”
For myself, I’d say it’s sexist because it has the shape of a sexist thing. Perhaps someone else can put it more eloquently! If I was speaking of an architect, lawyer, or even a small-d doctor, and another person said “Excuse me, did you say ‘she’?”, you’d recognise that as a sexist line. It’s not quite the same thing here, because the Doctor’s not an unknown third party but the mutual friend they all share… but even so it feels rooted in that sexist disbelief that a woman could be fill-in-the-blank.
Now of course one can attempt excuses for this. You could say that, based on the classic serials, Ian Chesterton doesn’t know the Doctor can regenerate, much less regenerate as a woman. But Chesterton isn’t a real person! Somebody wrote that line. They could have written a different one. Wrapping up your era of the show by having a character say ‘can you BELIEVE the Doctor is a WOMAN?!’ is A Choice.
November 18, 2024 @ 4:43 am
As a one-off dash, I guess, but I don’t think it’s writers straining the fiction to actually have characters acknowledge that someone they knew changed gender, and that this is especially surprising if they knew the Doctor specifically as old man Hartnell. I could go for a ton more of that than ignoring it completely, which is Chibnall’s overall actual position.
November 18, 2024 @ 8:55 am
I guess on reflection, I might cite as an example of making the opposite decision RTD deciding to put “Don’t throw red meat to the bastards who will make man-in-a-dress jokes” ahead of “Be logically consistent with the way regeneration has worked in every case since 1970”.
But I’m not sure if that’s actually the opposite decision or not. It is certainly feels different, but, at least to me, of a kind.
November 18, 2024 @ 8:04 am
It felt to me like there was clearly a note in the script saying “Make sure to have Ian signal that he doesn’t know about regeneration or the fans will eat you,” and then it got implemented in the blinkered tone-deaf way everything in the scope of this era gets handled that leaves it feeling more sexist than if they hadn’t bothered.
I think there’s a little smile or chuckle accompanying the line to soften the blow and make it clear that Ian is surprised, but doesn’t disapprove? But it’s still a line that makes it very clear that someone put “Make sure the audience knows we haven’t forgotten that Ian doesn’t know about regeneration” above “Don’t be sexist”.
It calls to mind the bit with Eleven and Susan the Horse – an exchange where the Doctor uses the wrong pronouns for the horse, because if he’d used the right ones, the audience would have understood the exchange to mean “Somehow the sheriff had mistaken his mare for a stallion”, and Moffat wanted to be sure they understood that his intended meaning was that the horse was trans. He said the wrong thing because saying the right thing was less important to him than sending the message.
November 11, 2024 @ 11:49 am
The Pointless numbers are pretty damning, but also i suspect if you ask the same 100 people for the names of Doctor Who episodes in any era they’d come up short. Blink would score, maybe Rose, Dalek or Doomsday and End of Time, but that would be it.
November 11, 2024 @ 11:51 am
Sure, but how do you think the Tennant era would have done if you polled it in early 2010?
November 11, 2024 @ 12:17 pm
Better, certainly. If only because Davies is smart enough not to name episodes The Battles of Ranskoor Av Kolos, or that BBC One would have made a dedicated David Tennant episode of Pointless. (There’s probably a very short You Were Expecting Someone Else to be made from Tennant’s various appearances on panel shows in late 2009) But even then I can’t picture an episode title getting named by more than 20%.
Episode titles just tend to wash off people. Possibly because you see them before you know whether or not they’re worth remembering. More than once I’ve heard my mum refer to an episode as “The one with the Daleks” and had to ask her to narrow it down.
Very hard to tell what gets traction with outsiders. I’d guess blink is the most well known title, but I don’t know how to test that.
November 11, 2024 @ 4:35 pm
I’m pretty sure that episode was called The Bottles of Rosencranz and Guildenstern. Why else would Chibnall have included those sequences of David Tennant and Catherine Tate flirting in Elizabethan English?
Or am I thinking of their run in Much Ado About Nothing? I watched that on the Masterpiece Theatre website, and it was delightful. Much more than The Bangles of Ravenswood and Jones.
November 11, 2024 @ 4:48 pm
The very reason Friends named its episodes “The One with X” was that it’s a joke about how audiences never remember the real titles of episodes and instead think of them as “The One Where There’s a Bus in a Desert” or “The One With All the Companions and Davros”. Fans are obsessed with titles the way we’re obsessed with writers, it’s part of our fascination with the process of the show’s production. But I reckon a random not-we could watch an episode and love it, then the next day be unable to remember the title.
November 11, 2024 @ 5:06 pm
Absolutely. I’ve known some not-we who can watch an episode, love it and the next day be unable to remember that they’ve even watched it.
November 12, 2024 @ 6:00 am
100% this. My wife loved the Tennant era, but I doubt she could name a single episode title. Maybe “Blink” at a push.
November 11, 2024 @ 8:47 pm
I don’t even think many would know “Blink” – more likely “the one with the Angels and Tennant” or something, I’d wager. In general, I don’t even think people remember or talk about the blinking specifically, just ‘those Angels that move when you look away’. But I’d guess people would still take a stab at guessing “Blink” over pretty much any Whittaker era title.
November 11, 2024 @ 7:34 pm
There was actually a Pointless jackpot round on all of classic Who, and several stories were not pointless. Including The Power of Kroll for some reason.
November 12, 2024 @ 5:18 pm
I’ve just looked it up. The only ones that scored any points at all were Unearthly Child, The Daleks, The Ice Warriors, The Invasion, The Tenth Planet, Planet of the Spiders, The Ark in Space, The Pirate Planet, The Power of Kroll, The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors
November 11, 2024 @ 12:48 pm
I’ve got nothing to add. I’m sorry a shitty time in your life coincided with the worst era of our favourite show and I hope things get better for you and it.
As to –
“That kid’s gotta be around that age now. I imagine her discovering the blog and going to read, only to find thirty-two straight posts trashing the era that excited and delighted her”
Evidently her initial excitement was caused by THAT trailer. I think every Doctor Who fan, (and indeed some ‘Not We’) got pretty exercised by the Whittaker reveal. For good or ill. However, it’s reasonable to suppose that the actual episodes might have left her as unedified as all of us. If she has indeed discovered this blog, I really hope it provides some explanation of why the ship was scuppered by its own captain.
November 11, 2024 @ 12:52 pm
What’s hilarious about this, mind, is that Whittaker could just have stayed in the mashup outfit Dhawan put together until she regenerates. (Maybe losing the celery.) She puts her other, worse costume back on completely unnecessarily.
November 11, 2024 @ 9:21 pm
Someone pointed out that the actual result of the Master’s scheme is just the Master wearing the Doctor’s clothes and calling himself “The Doctor”. I’ve seen a lot of effort put into cosplay before, but that’s getting ridiculous.
November 12, 2024 @ 3:27 am
Yeah, I get unreasonably annoyed that the episode seems to want us to believe that the Master is right when he says “I’m the Doctor now”, when there’s no reasonable measure by which that’s correct – he looks the same and acts the same as he did in his original body! This is no different to Crispy master hijacking Tremas’s body, and we don’t call Ainley “The Second Tremas”
November 12, 2024 @ 7:56 am
If there were ever a place where one could make the argument “He performed a magical ritual and thus even though it just looks like it’s still Sacha Dhawan wearing a stupid outfit, he really has traded places with the Doctor in a way that is far truer and more fundamental than the mere accidents of appearance suggest, wresting control of the Doctor’s power to bend narrative and thus the universe”, it is Tardis Eruditorum. What a pity Chibnall spent his entire tenure disinclining anyone from actually wanting to bother trying to argue that.
November 11, 2024 @ 3:35 pm
I have come to the conclusion that
‘she is nut’s ‘ rambling about Dr
Who eras , & you out there let
her write garbage & print it on
this forum Elizabeth Who ???
don’t worry in 10 minutes she
will be forgotten.
As for the fan’s out there in the
early day’s the show was made on
a shoe string Budget. Props were
paper , cardboard , plastic sheeting
etc , so stop mud raking & get
behind the show ……
Long Live the Doctorrrrrr 🥰🥰
November 11, 2024 @ 4:01 pm
Was this supposed to be intelligible?
November 12, 2024 @ 9:28 am
Chibnall, responds!
November 11, 2024 @ 3:43 pm
Was Mel in this one? I feel like she was.
November 11, 2024 @ 5:20 pm
Very very briefly, in the (deep sigh) companion support group. Their very last seen is Kate showing up at the meeting and saying that she “may want to recruit some of you for some work”, so Mel working for UNIT in RTD2 two episodes later stands as this completely arbitrary but extremely specific bit of continuity.
November 11, 2024 @ 5:02 pm
One thing that felt a bit off about this episode, despite the fact that I was never keen on Whitaker’s portrayal of the Doctor, was that this was her final story and yet it was a multi-Doctor and also loaded with other characters from the past. This has never happened with any other Doctor. She effectively didn’t get to be star of her own final story , and particularly after all the flack she got that felt like a bad decision.
November 11, 2024 @ 5:03 pm
I do feel obliged to point out that this is David Bradley’s second consecutive appearance in a regeneration story.
November 11, 2024 @ 5:13 pm
D’oh! Of course. It didn’t feel to me as if he overshadowed Capaldi’s departure in quite the same way the same way though.
November 11, 2024 @ 5:22 pm
Well, “Twice Upon a Time” was really the epilogue/Part Three of a multi-parter…
November 11, 2024 @ 7:48 pm
There is a great deal of sadness in this essay, so I wanted to let you know it also made me chuckle, chortle, and snort.
November 11, 2024 @ 9:29 pm
That episode had way bigger problems as you pointed out, but I somehow can’t get over the fact the plot had the Master as Rasputin, and yet the show did nothing with it. That part of the story could have been set in literally any other time or place, and it wouldn’t have any consequences whatsoever. And that would have been alright if they did anything with the characters, but the best we got was the Master dancing over Boney M…
November 11, 2024 @ 10:55 pm
My best guess is that with the right beard, Sacha Dhawan actually does look somewhat like Rasputin, and that was the entire motivation for including Rasputin.
November 12, 2024 @ 5:42 am
I think the motivation for that was more likely to be that having the Master dance to Ra Ra Rasputin heavy-handedly evokes that time when RTD had the Master dance to Here Come The Drums.
November 12, 2024 @ 6:59 am
I thought so too but hilariously, it’s been confirmed that the dance was improvised by Dhawan. The script just instructed him to stand there and do nothing as the song plays.
November 12, 2024 @ 2:47 pm
That pretty much encapsulates the Chibnall run: “here’s a small bit that actually works; turns out it wasn’t Chibnall’s idea.”
November 13, 2024 @ 8:09 pm
Good grief.
November 14, 2024 @ 8:28 am
But that was the best part 😭 ? Thank you Mr. Dhawan. You deserved better stories for your character.
November 12, 2024 @ 6:11 am
There’s a fascinating case of something being lost in redrafts here — in earlier versions of the script, the tie-in to early-20th century Russia was because the Cyber-Moon was connected to the Tunguska Meteorite of 1908, a classic Pompeii/Mary-Celeste-style “sci-fi explanation for a famous weird historical event”. So he gave the Master a loosely era-appropriate alias. But then he realised the dates were too hard to make match up, forcing him to claim that the Meteorite was an earlier failed prototype of the Cyber-Moon and I don’t know what gubbins — so he cut Tunguska, but at that point the Rasputin Master was baked in.
(This same early script draft also made it clear that in Chibnall’s head the Master just is Rasputin, as a Beethoven paradox, as opposed to impersonating Rasputin. It would also hilariously ave suggested that the reason he’s a dying wreck when he last confronts the Doctor on the Cyber-Planet isn’t the physical strain of the bodyswap, but rather that in-between scenes he went through the whole poisoned-shot-and-drowned thing.)
November 12, 2024 @ 9:00 am
For Chibnall to go from “here’s the show attempting to educate you about real historical events and figures” in Series 11 – regardless of how you feel he handled that to – “here’s the show saying entire historical events and actual flesh and blood people who lived and breathed and died didn’t actually exist” is an even worse collapse of his early intentions with his historicals than the one represented by Legend of the Sea Devils, and oooh golly that is saying something.
November 12, 2024 @ 3:09 pm
As many know, For Series 10, Peter Harness pitched a story about the meddling monk (played by Matt Berry) accidentally driving Rasputin insane by playing him Boney M and then being forced to live his life. “How the Monk Got his Habit” perhaps the greatest unmade story since Shada
What’s more, Harness said in 2019 that he really wanted to write for Dr Who again, and was doing everything in his power to make it happen
So until proven otherwise, I am convinced that Harness pitched this to Chris Chibnall. Chibnall paid him off (which does happen) and then completely ruined the idea.
November 13, 2024 @ 3:05 am
I’m sure that it would be nothing like I imagine – if only because what I’m imagining is Lazlo from What We Do in the Shadows – but I need RTD to let Harness write, maybe not this script, but a script that puts Matt Berry in Doctor Who.
November 14, 2024 @ 8:39 am
Oooooooooh, that would explain so much! I feel like they should have canned the whole Russian thread at this point. It doesn’t really make any sense after that rewrite. It would have been more logical to have the body swap happens in the same area as the other parts of the plot.
November 12, 2024 @ 6:37 am
That irritated me about it as well , in fact I concluded from it that the entire purpose of it had been to include the Boney M track. The Master as Rasputin or turning out to be the real Rasputin does make Doctor Who sense, but as you say doesn’t go anywhere story wise. Or maybe it was away to allude to a certain Doctor Who actor who is still with us but was probably not up to appearing in the epsiode?
November 14, 2024 @ 5:48 am
I do wonder if Chibnall had ideas for a third series that couldn’t happen because Flux was so truncated. A lot of the ideas in this episode could have made an episode in themselves, but were at the “one sentence suggestion” idea
A Dalek traitor decides his race must be defeated
The Master is Rasputin (dances to Boney M, haha!)
Cybermen invade UNIT
School Reunion style returns for Tegan and Ace
The Master uses forced regeneration to swap places with the Doctor
The Daleks are using machines to trigger earthquakes
The Cybermen enslave an energy being disguised as a child into powering a Cyberplanet
With one more episode to go, he just poured all of those ideas into one packed episode.
That’s how it reads to me anyway, as there’s not really enough to tie together all these disparate plots in the episodes.
November 14, 2024 @ 8:47 am
I was actually quite excited when “Rasputin” turned to the camera and I saw he happened to be played by Sacha Dhawan. For a moment I thought they had finally done something interesting with his Master. But it just sputtered off into nothingness…
November 12, 2024 @ 9:30 am
As a Canadian, there’s a special twinge of rage at the scene where The Master dances to “Rasputin” while impersonating Rasputin. The song “Rasputin” by Boney M is a major part of the indoctrination methods of one of Canada’s most notorious post-pandemic QAnon cult, Romana Didulo. She lives in a convoy of RVs, claims to be the Queen of Canada, installed by the army in a 2021 overthrow of the Trudeau government. Her followers live with her in the travelling convoy, dress in identical robes, and have walked away from their mortgage payments and utilities bills because Didulo assures them that she’s cancelled all debts under her authority as Queen. She constantly plays “Rasputin” on a loop in her RV/office and demands that her inner circle listen to it and dance to it all the time.
November 26, 2024 @ 1:20 pm
Thanks for that, finally some useful historical knowledge.
November 12, 2024 @ 5:34 pm
There was, apparently, an extra scene in the script where the master goes back to Russia, and gets shot and thrown in the river by Russians. It’s just before he reappears on the cyber planet to kill the doctor. Weird place to put it, so I’m not surprised it got cropped.
November 13, 2024 @ 11:12 am
IIRC, the DWM review back in 2002 or whatever of the Third Doctor novel The Wages of Sin by David McIntee (I think?) – a book which features Rasputin and that time period – went out of its way to say that at least Rasputin didn’t turn out to be the Master or whatever, another example of the Chibnall era having somehow been parodied and made fun of by DW stories and critical voices before it was ever made, so rote and familiar are many of its ideas.
November 11, 2024 @ 10:27 pm
her and my sister’s need for hope is not compatible with my need to accept the inevitable and start processing it.
This sentence really resonates with me given the hole in which we live.
November 12, 2024 @ 1:57 am
I’m impressed you got 65,000 words about this era. It barely gets any sort of reaction from me, and if you asked me what my favourite time travel show in 2018-2022 was, I’d probably say Legends of Tomorrow – at least the cast of that show seemed like they were having fun.
November 12, 2024 @ 4:58 am
My favourite part of this sorry mess of TV is the bit at the end of the ‘old Doctors’ clip…
*8th Doctor: So until it’s settled, he may be vulnerable. We need help from the outside, which is easier said than done.
*13th Doctor: Unless one of us, or all of us, were really clever. I mean, this is why you manifested here! To remind me there’s always a way. Things always work out, right?
Then, literally that’s that until everyone beyond the headspace realm or whatever brings Jodie back. Yet right there 13 says “unless we’re really clever” as if she’s forming a plan. But nope. Saved by external factors once again.
November 12, 2024 @ 6:14 am
I think the implication is that the Holo-Doctor is crucial to the flesh-and-blood people on the outside doing any good, so the Doctor’s foresight in implanting the hologram-projecting chip in Tegan, Ace and Yaz prior to the bodyswap counts as her being “really clever”, chessmaster-McCoy-style. Of course, this does mean that by the point she says it, Dr Who didn’t need to be reminded of anything, since she’d already done all the clever work she needed to; the Guardians would literally just serve to remind her that she’ll be fine, she planned for this, all is going according to plan.
November 12, 2024 @ 10:21 am
This is an admirable example of a whole subgenre of ‘explaining Chibnall writing so it’s still unsatisfactory, but now in a different way’.
November 12, 2024 @ 11:33 am
Having quit the Chibnall era after The Timeless Children, and only subsequently watched Legend of the Sea Devils (for prospecive “so bad it’s good” purposes), I have only now discovered from this comment that Chibbers kept doing the electronic implant thing right up to the end.
November 12, 2024 @ 2:52 pm
There’s a really interesting extension/refutation of the RTD1 era’s “you turn your companions into weapons” accusation here that makes the Doctor’s purpose as much about inspiration as being the one who saves the day and which could even partly salvage Thirteen’s deep-seated passivity problems, but Chibnall couldn’t pull it off if he wanted to and he doesn’t want to.
November 12, 2024 @ 12:40 pm
I’m sorry such a difficult and sad time in your life coincided with such a dire period of Doctor Who.
November 12, 2024 @ 2:06 pm
I appreciate that.
I’ll admit, I’d been looking forward to your comment on this, after multiple comments in which you expressed skepticism about my approach to the era and whether I could pull it out in the last post. And I’m genuinely curious where you ended up on that question.
November 12, 2024 @ 3:21 pm
I think my take-away from Elizabeth’s posts, as much as anything else, is to imagine this era of Doctor Who as situated within Chris Chibnall’s life. Like, what was really happening for him? Presumably he was excited at this chance to run the show, but did he actually have any ideas? Once he was running it, and writing most of the scripts, how much of his life was a Red Queen’s Race and how much joy? Was he miserable, or happy, or too busy to be much of anything? Was there a midlife crisis moment for him where he realized that in achieving a childhood dream, he’d situated himself in a place where he no longer wanted to be? Was he, like Moffat in his final year, hanging on in the expectation that if he stopped, Doctor Who did too? Is El’s self-centric approach to the era a reflection of the same problem on the showrunner side of things? Is Chibnall finding out that while he wanted to run Doctor Who, he not only doesn’t enjoy it, he doesn’t have that much to say? And when confronted with the choice of saying nothing repeatedly and being miserable, or making a clean break at the cost of the show itself, did he hang on because he valued the show too much to avoid devaluing it in this way?
Kudos to him for the first female Doctor casting (yes, yes, Curse of Fatal Death aside), even though it’s clear after casting Whittaker he hasn’t the foggiest idea what to do either with her or the character. I can point to any of the other New Era Doctors and explain why this casting at this time; if you wanted to tell stories with Thirteen, aside from The Witchfinders you’re essentially opting out of telling the stories you could uniquely tell with her. And I think that continues throughout: any explanation for “why” Chibnall makes a choice in his run seems to be contingent on something immediate and not any kind of broader vision or plan or idea. RTD opens with “working-class Doctor” to “sexy Doctor in love” and Moffat has a mercurial Doctor to mix together One with Seven’s “overthrow the government, back in time for tea” approach, followed by a Doctor with a very careful character arc disrupted by that extra year where Capaldi gets to show even more range after becoming so clearly who his Doctor is. Or, if you prefer, the show restarts with joy coupled to enduring grief and suffering, shifts to joy seeking to redeem or reclaim suffering and transform it, worries for a while about being too old and doing more harm than good, then makes a clear statement about what it is before reluctantly handing the reins over to Chibnall (and with good reason). That RTD 2 opens with a story redeeming Donna Noble’s first ending and off-screening decades of therapy to give us a Fifteen filled more with joy than grief seems almost too on the nose.
I think what we’re missing right now is context, especially Doctor Who context. If RTD 2 crashes and burns after two seasons on Disney +, that’s very different than if it runs another ten or twenty years or is still running as we all return to dust.
I will say this about Chibnall as a writer, as well as what most of his co-writers manage to produce: Thirteen’s run seems primed to encourage new fans to produce fan-fiction, if only because these characters have so much promise that isn’t fulfilled on-screen. Like Five before her, Thirteen’s malleability and haplessness create space. Maybe you can imagine yourself as Three or Four, but only a “you” within very narrow parameters, and anyone else imagining themselves as companion is going to be pretty marginalized simply because those Doctors are so domineering. Whereas even a one-episode character is as likely to have the hero’s role as Thirteen. The episodes usually have one or two interesting ideas that they utterly fail to deliver on, but only rarely do they make the initial idea seem bad, just the implementation. I wrote 1800 words the evening Revolution of the Daleks aired “fixing” the plot because I was both angry at the waste, and provoked at how little needed to change to make the episode land.
If we were to identify a single Doctor Who companion to associate with a specific era of the show, I think we might all agree that the Chibnall era is Kamelion: overengineered in ways that don’t actually facilitate function, massively subject to projection, a probably bad idea to begin with made far worse by colossally bad luck and the misfortunes befalling those involved, and something that couldn’t have gone that well even if it had gone much better than it did. And like Kamelion, it’s easy to forget bits and pieces of its time while holding other moments in the mind (probably with burning fury); also, to quote somebody, “Kamelion no good. Sorry.” Also, impossible to read and interpret without taking a Doylist perspective on some level: you can’t understand what happened in the series without understanding what’s happening on the production side.
Also, like Kamelion, it’s only likely to be experienced again in a vastly diminished form. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the TCE joke.)
November 26, 2024 @ 1:30 pm
See, Church on Ruby Road is still fundamentally different to the others, and you touched on my feelings for that there, thanks.
November 26, 2024 @ 1:31 pm
As in that it’s different to the whole rest of the series starring Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor on some level other than the surface of the usual bits, just to confirm.
November 13, 2024 @ 6:50 am
On a plot level, is it just me who also found it hard to navigate what was happening and when, regarding the Master? Are his Rasputin and seismologist plans running concurrently? Is he constantly re-growing and then shaving the beard? Is one played out in full before the other? How does it piece together, with his TARDIS latched on to the cyber-moon for most of the episode?
November 13, 2024 @ 8:16 am
I always assumed all the seismologist stuff was before all the Rasputin stuff, though IDK if that checks out
November 13, 2024 @ 10:58 am
I believe that’s correct.
November 13, 2024 @ 1:22 pm
Already commented my feelings on the Patreon so here I’ll just say- the Now My Doctor chapter for the book version is going to be interesting
November 14, 2024 @ 2:20 am
“ The Doctor doesn’t die trying to save anyone. She doesn’t die because of hubris. She dies because the Master pushes the “she dies” button due to reaching the end of the episode.”
The most fitting conceivable way to end the era, honestly.
I’d include the build-up to that moment as well, because – as always – Chibs has the right ingredients for a great moment, but then takes a hard swerve into “ugh.” Let’s imagine a slightly different version of that scene where the child-creature, who needs to let out a bunch of energy or she’ll blow everything up, can only be convinced to do that if the Doctor literally walks up to her and hugs her. Right? We already know
she identifies with the alien kid because of the Timeless Child thing, and – even if she doesn’t want to know the whole truth yet – her era comes to a close with her essentially learning to embrace the unknown parts of herself.
But naw instead they sorta did that, but instead the Master pushed a button and that’s what did it. :sigh: It’s infuriating in such a specifically Chibnall way. Perfect capper to the era.
November 14, 2024 @ 8:16 am
Probably would’ve needed to make the child-creature an actual character rather than just an identityless macguffin.
November 14, 2024 @ 4:40 am
First time commenting after many years reading – thanks for sharing this, Dr Sandifer. That such a difficult time in your life was accompanied by such a dire period for something you’ve always loved is just terrible, and I’m glad you’ve been able to write about it.
Specifically on ‘The Power of the Doctor’, I remember coming away from it thinking – and I don’t normally do this with TV as other people’s writing is not my own writing – that it was odd that the ‘power of the Doctor’ wasn’t the limitless regenerative power, and that the Master wasn’t trying to steal it for a classic bit of ‘Master prolonging life’ (feeding into Chibnall’s love for eighties Who). Only for Tegan, Ace, Graham, Yaz, Kate, and whoever else was along for the ride to be inspired by the Doctor and save the day while she was incapacitated. Then the old companions group at the end would be accompanied by a voiceover from Yaz telling the audience that the inspiration for heroism the Doctor passed along was ‘the real power of the Doctor’.
It sounds immensely corny, ‘the real power of the Doctor was the friends we made along the way’ – but I think it’s what a better writer (not to declare myself a better writer!) would have thrown together at short notice, and it still would have bested what we had on screen.
Thanks for all this – I’m enjoying collecting the printed volumes too. Looking forward to reading your entries on the sixtieth and beyond (surely stopping for Redacted – though maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part)!
November 14, 2024 @ 8:21 am
Although it is especially true in the Chibnall era of obvious hack writing, I don’t think there is any period of the show where you could do an episode titled “The Power of the Doctor” and anyone even vaguely familiar with the show wouldn’t instantly know in the depts of their soul that the real power of the Doctor was going to turn out to be Friendship. Moffat or RTD would have done it better, but the would have come to the same conclusion.
November 26, 2024 @ 1:34 pm
Maybe the First Doctor’s era? I could imagine them convincing the audience otherwise.
November 14, 2024 @ 9:25 pm
Wait, Janet’s gone to the dark side? Naur. I hadn’t seen anything about this?
November 14, 2024 @ 9:47 pm
The narrative of your blog for this era reminds me of the power of serialised storytelling. I really found this post moving and thank you for writing about an era you actively hate. I do see this era as pretty terrible ‘content’ Doctor Who. But I also know people who love it or love parts of it. Now it is over, I just feel ambivalent about it, and I’ll occasionally rewatch an episode when someone gives a redemptive reading (only Orphan 55, Power, and Eve do I actually find any fun to watch, mind).
I hope time papers over the pain of this era for you. I think in time you might find the incompetence to be endearing enough to find a couple guilty pleasures within it. Even the political content of the era which I dislike, I find to be more incompetent than meaningfully deconstructing the left-leaning (for the most part) morality of the show I love.
November 17, 2024 @ 1:01 am
From a trans perspective, it’s hard to overstate the betrayal one feels when the first female Doctor ends up never being a celebratory statement of the character’s queer nature, but instead a soulless, confused disappointment marred by complicity and conformity. I’m glad that I’m encountering it not on transmission and with the benefit of knowing it doesn’t end here, but I really do hope the redemptive reading the era needs comes along before too long (all I’ve got is the potential for a transmasculine reading of the 14/15th doctors, but neither the time nor the place…)
November 17, 2024 @ 5:00 am
Well, that took me back to how I can never watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer again because of its ubiquity in my life during the similarly abusive end of my marriage.
Sigh/ugh, life.
But look: in my case, I have lost something of value because Buffy was great; you losing this era of Doctor Who means little. Disliking it doesn’t make you the villain, the show failed you, not you it. I’m pretty sure there are no villains here (not even Chibnall, if you follow Hanlon’s Razor), but least of all you, although I understand how those ghosts can keep calling.
November 18, 2024 @ 9:58 pm
“The pre-80s Doctors are at this point inaccessible due to the ravages of time save for the idiosyncratically recastable First.”
I think that’s mostly true inasmuch as, if Sean Pertwee ever indicated he’d be open to the idea of guesting as the Third Doctor (which to date he hasn’t), the series would be on him like a rash.
November 19, 2024 @ 7:20 am
I’ve no doubt they would, but in fact Sean Pertwee is on record as saying he would never do it. This doesn’t seem to stop a certain section of fandom continually begging him via FB posts to do it “for the fans”. At which point I point out that it’s a bit weird to expect someone to cosplay their late dad.
Harry Melling seems to be in their sights as well.
November 20, 2024 @ 2:47 am
Yikes. Honestly, I think the series should bring back the classic-era Doctors (including the ones played by still-living-but-now-old actors) via recasting, but leave sons/grandsons out of it if they don’t want to be involved. It’s kinda weird that the First Doctor is the only one the series has seen fit to recast (although it made sense in The Five Doctors as Hartnell was the only deceased Doctor at that time).
November 19, 2024 @ 11:53 am
Genuinely curious about the basis of the Janet Fielding-TERF accusation? Where’s that coming from?
November 19, 2024 @ 11:57 am
An assortment of convention stories and privately relayed anecdotes.
November 20, 2024 @ 1:12 am
Oh. That’s disappointing to hear.
November 20, 2024 @ 2:53 am
Yeah, especially considering the points she retrospectively gained for being outspokenly feminist and critical about Doctor Who back in the 80s and 90s.
November 29, 2024 @ 1:29 pm
I suspect you won’t be covering Jodie’s upcoming Big Finish adventures….