Outside the Government: Lockdown
Shortly thereafter, everything went to absolute shit. On March 11th, COVID was finally named a pandemic. The same day, Atletico Madrid played Liverpool in the Champions League, prompting a spike of cases in northwest England. A week later it was announced that the schools would close. Two days later, restaurants. Three days after that, on March 23rd, the UK officially entered lockdown.
The big move happened a week later, in the nebulous space of that early pandemic—we were isolating, and everything was shut down, but masks weren’t a thing yet. Those came a few weeks later—at least it feels like weeks. The timeline frankly just sort of collapses into a long haze of lockdown and waiting for the vaccines. I couldn’t really tell you what parts happen when anywhere between that and the election beyond a few individual dates like the disastrous surgery consult in which I learn I am not a candidate for vaginoplasty without significant weight loss. (My wife is with me, as she’s a medical professional and I wanted her there to ask and answer questions. Sitting in the passenger seat sobbing inconsolably, I find that the only thing I actually want is Penn.)
Meanwhile, for what is essentially the only time during the Chibnall era, Doctor Who found itself ahead of the cultural curve. Unsurprisingly, Chibnall had nothing to do with it. Instead credit goes to Emily Cook, then an employee at Doctor Who Magazine but soon to find herself an appreciably bigger deal (she’s now a development executive on Peter Harness’s new series), organized a Twitter-based watchalong of The Day of the Doctor (#SaveTheDay) to take place on March 21st, the day the schools were ordered closed, bringing Steven Moffat out of Twitter retirement to play along. Moffat went so far as to write a short intro sketch akin to Strax’s introduction to the cinema screenings of the episode, for which Dan Starkey gamely filmed a voiceover with a Strax plushie, claiming to have been shrunk by the “Spy Master.” Neve McIntosh contributed a vocal cameo. It was all a lot of fun.
And then it kept going. For two months, Emily Cook corralled various writers and actors onto Twitter for tweetalongs and to create bonus content for a total of nineteen watchalongs. This content found itself getting increasingly elaborate and well-produced. The second watchalong, for Rose (#TripofaLifetime), saw Russell T Davies drop both an abandoned “how Paul McGann regenerated into Christopher Eccleston” bit of prose and a sequel called “Revenge of the Nestene” that sees the Nestene Consciousness take over Boris Johnson. The fourth, for The Eleventh Hour (#FishCustard) saw Moffat pen a piece called “The Raggedy Doctor, by Amelia Pond,” narrated by Caitlin Blackwood and given full-on original illustrations. By the time of The Doctor’s Wife (#BiggerontheInside) Neil Gaiman was penning an original scene for Arthur Darvill to deliver to camera and it was clear these had obtained a proper critical mass, such that everyone thereafter largely gave their all to the problem “how can we create a two minute extra tied to this episode without any of us leaving our houses?” There was a variety of other relevant content as well—various short stories, eventually collected in an anthology called Adventures in Lockdown, and a few webcasts made separate from Cook’s tweetalongs project. In short, there was an entirely vibrant mini-era of Doctor Who in which Emily Cook was the surprise de facto showrunner.
This had interesting implications for all three creative eras of the new series. Let’s start with Chibnall, who was conspicuous by his absence. He contributed a handful of things—most notably a short scene that Whittaker filmed in her closet in which she offered blandly reassuring lies about how “darkness never prevails” while explaining that she was hiding from Sontarans. It’s been called, in all seriousness, the high point of her tenure—admittedly usually by people who don’t like her tenure. But it’s no more of a crazy argument than saying that “From the Doctor to my Son Thomas” is the high point of Capaldi’s tenure, which is to say that it requires a specific and deeply idiosyncratic set of aesthetic values, but makes a certain kind of sense given them. But of course, nobody really said that about Capaldi’s era. Still, it’s better than Gal Gadot’s cover of “Imagine.”
And, of course, there’s that Joy Wilkinson short story “The Simple Things” in which the Doctor discovers Draconians using human labor to build warships (which they justify by saying that “our civilisation is too advanced to have our own people do such lowly labour”) and decides that’s perfectly OK because “warships would always be built by poorer worlds and used by richer worlds to destroy each other,” a moment that is either the single worst or single best moment of the Chibnall era, depending entirely on the unknowable detail of whether Wilkinson was attempting a Warmongeresque bit of satire or not.
But that was about it. None of the nineteen watchalongs were of Chibnall-era episodes. Indeed, the two subsequent runs of lockdown watchalongs were also Chibnall-free. The official series Twitter organized watchalongs of The Timeless Children for November 23rd and Resolution for December 21st (to celebrate the debut of the Daleks and, implicitly, to tease Revolution of the Daleks), but requested to not be included in Cook’s project. Which meant that the Cook era became a celebration of the Moffat and Davies eras of the series. Moffat penned “The Terror of the Umpty-Ums,” an exceedingly meta story that is nevertheless clearly a Whittaker story, although that was for the Doctor Who website and not Cook’s project. And Paul Cornell did a piece where Whittaker decides to let Daughter-of-Mine out of the mirror that coincided with the Human Nature/The Family of Blood watchalong (#DoctorOfMine), but that was about it.
Instead the tweetalongs became a celebration of the Moffat and Davies eras. In some ways this was probably good. If nothing else, it meant that the stink of The Timeless Children didn’t hang in the air as much as it might have, drowned out by an unexpected glut of new Doctor Who stuff in a period that otherwise would have been downtime. Instead of being hung up on the stupid retcons fandom instead became focused on online community and silly little webcasts while it rode out a twenty month period over which only a single episode aired. But it also meant that, in many ways, the Chibnall era ended in March of 2020. Sure there were ten more episodes, but by the time it actually came back for its thirteenth season it was a lame duck era. Once the rush of immediate coverage around The Timeless Children died down there wasn’t really another moment in which Chris Chibnall felt like the now of Doctor Who, even if we were still more than three and a half years away from the next episode that wouldn’t have his name on it.
For the Moffat era, meanwhile, the lockdown run proved strangely mixed. In one sense he was the star of it, writing an absolute ton of stuff and having six tweetalongs focused on his stories, versus four for Davies. The complexity came with what would have been the seventh. After a May 31st tweetalong of Silence in the Library/The Forest of the Dead (#HelloSweetie), the next one was intended to be World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls, on June 6th. This, however, did not end up happening.
The reason for this is because of a substantial outcry over the confluence of the plot point in which Bill is shot in the opening scenes and the fact that George Floyd had been murdered just two weeks prior. A portion of Black fandom organized a counter-event, #DoctorWhoBlackout, that was set to watch The Ghost Monument, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, Thin Ice, and Knock Knock, and ultimately, the plug was pulled on the main one in favor of letting that one go on uncontested.
Which… I mean, it’s not going to surprise anyone reading this that I cannot imagine a single circumstance in which I would ever rather watch The Ghost Monument, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, or Knock Knock than World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls. I’m as capable as ever at penning an essay knocking back the attacks on the episode, large swaths of which demonstrated all the media literacy familiar to anyone who was on Tumblr during the Moffat era itself. I think the story does Bill proud, and that it has profound things to say about the horrors inflicted upon her. I’d readily argue that, even though it’s focused more on disability and illness than race, the scene of turning down the volume on the patient who’s just repeating the word “pain” over and over again has more to say about the treatment of Black people and the eventual fate of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests than Rosa, little yet The Ghost Monument. Moffat’s minisode, released anyway as it’d been recorded, even draws this connection when Bill, talking about the protests, notes that “not all Cybermen have handles,” drawing a pretty direct line between the forms of institutional violence on display.
But the correct response to all of that, frankly, is “well that’s all right then.” Large numbers of Black fans did not want to watch a story in which we see a Black woman with a gaping hole in her chest two weeks after the murder of George Floyd. That’s dispositive, and in the face of it calling it off was the only remotely reasonable thing to do.
Nevertheless, it meant that the air went out of things. There were no further watchalongs until November (when the UK went into a second lockdown), and nobody wrote bonus content for that round. That’s probably not causal—two months was already a long time for these to be running. When they did return, Moffat and Davies participated in a couple more tweetalongs, but the energy had been sapped—the second wave never had anything like the cultural weight of the first one. Inasmuch as the Cook era is a coherent concept, the World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls non-tweetalong proved to be its Ancestor Cell or its Zagreus—the moment where its mandate lapsed, as distinct from its actual end.
And then, of course, there’s Davies. Two moments stand out, only one of which was visible at the time. That’s the minisode he wrote for New Earth and Gridlock (#NewNewYork), “The Secret of Novice Hame,” which was notable for being the first time in all of the minisodes that an actual Doctor showed up, played by the original actor. More interesting, however, was the tone of it—Novice Hame talks about a vast and terrible secret behind New Earth that she intends to reveal to David Tennant, but passes away before she has the chance. It’s a markedly different tone to previous minisodes , which generally just offered some silly fun or an opportunity to have Doctor Who characters offer inchoate observations about the pandemic. This was forward-looking, and actively served to unsettle the continuity of the Davies era.
Which brings us to the other moment, which was at the time completely invisible. A month and a half previously, Davies had done the tweetalong for The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End (#SubwaveNetwork), where he’d been joined by David Tennant and Catherine Tate. Texting afterwards, Tate mused to Davies that it’d be fun to get the band back together, which he took as just her being polite until she followed up a bit later to say that she’d talked to Tennant and he was game. Davies, who knew that Chibnall was stepping down, felt obliged to tell the BBC, figuring that they’d find it an attractive option for the 60th Anniversary. He scheduled a meeting, at which the BBC in turn told him about their plans to link up with a streaming platform and coordinate global launches of new Doctor Who episodes. The rest is… well, not even history yet.
The exact timeline of these discussions isn’t clear, and it’s unlikely that by late May when he wrote the Novice Haim short Davies was already fully signed on as the next showrunner. But equally, it’s entirely likely that things were already trending in that direction. Certainly he knew that he might have more Tennant to write than just a little webcast. And there’s a clear sense with “The Secret of Novice Haim” of Davies switching from viewing his time on the series as a source of nostalgia to being an open book that might have more pages in it yet.
Quietly, amidst the wreckage, the future was beginning to cohere.
September 2, 2024 @ 6:23 am
A wonderfully concise overview of “the Cook Era”, thank you, which I guess must be one of the few in the programme’s history to so thorougly overlap – and indeed overshadow – what was supposedly the current “era” on television. (Probably the closest I can recall was my anticipation about Series 5 which, during 2009, made me somewhat impatient for David Tennant (et all) to vacate the premises.
I can’t say I actually took part in any of the Tweetalongs beyond “The Day of The Doctor” (I’d long fallen out of love with Twitter even by that point, and was slowly but surely getting ready to leave it behind) but I nevertheless kept on top of the videos, short stories, etc, and I certainly found it an interesting opportunity to look back on both the Moffat and Davies eras. At the time, I just assumed the relative lack of Chibnall episodes was down to them being (a) “disappointing” (ahem!), and (b) too soon to have developed any sense of nostalgia—and, as you mention, Chibnall did contribute a few things to the whole process, including an officially-sanctioned (sort of) “guide to lockdown”. Which, you know, probably did help some kids deal with things, so a bit of a win.
But I think your main point is spot-on. The future of Doctor Who from 2023 onwards wasn’t born in the Chibnall era; it was birthed in Cook’s. Which rather goes to prove that, once and for all, 21st century Doctor Who is amongst the best (as well as the worst) fan fiction out there!
September 2, 2024 @ 6:54 am
It’s almost like a speedrun version of the Wilderness Years, taking place while the show was still actually on TV.
Multimedia flowering of different kinds of Doctor Who experiment, reappraisal of old fan wisdoms (to an extent. I’d call the wholehearted embrace of RTD and Moffat nostalgia a reappraisal considering the loud bitter voices about them in fan circles by the end of their tenures), upheaval of fan/creative communication and access, and then the future is born as the limitations of the period hit.
I really like the labelling of it as the Cook era. And, interestingly given the discussion in the previous episode comments, it is an era driven by a producer figure rather than a writer figure!
And of course, given the overall project of Eruditorum positioning Doctor Who as a path through history, it had to intersect with Covid at some point. I’m glad the Cook era makes that interaction so fruitful and interesting rather than a dry account of production delays and adjustments.
September 2, 2024 @ 7:42 am
Thanks- I honestly hadn’t thought of the watchalongs in this way, but you make a really persuasive argument. It’s also good to be reminded of something that was a small bright light in the middle of Covid, at a point when Twitter was still (just) a site that made this kind of communal interaction possible.
September 2, 2024 @ 12:27 pm
I don’t think I knew about any of these lockdown-era minisodes until I read this entry, which I mention only because it illustrates just how much I (and I’m guessing many others too) checked out of Doctor Who after The Timeless Children aired. I suppose that story was the moment I stopped giving Chibnall even the most threadbare benefit of the doubt.
September 2, 2024 @ 1:23 pm
I’ve never been on Twitter so didn’t take part, but I watched/read the supporting material as it became available. I found it rather sad that Paul Cornell produced dialogue for Whittaker’s Doctor that was better than anything anyone had written for Jodie to perform. I read it out loud to the family, and it was so easy to find the cadence, plus it actually said something, and retroactively improved HN/FoB.
September 2, 2024 @ 7:38 pm
I just read “The Simple Things” and uh, yeah, that’s exactly what does happen. Sheesh.
Definitely wasn’t expecting “rich economies sourcing their weapons from poor economies is a positive-sum economic exchange, no other moral viewpoint on this is possible” in a light-hearted short story about Graham’s love of West Ham. It’s absolutely wild that the Doctor completely drops any objections because apparently this is just the way the world works, plus “the boss cared about his workers”, and the only counterpoint she offers is to suggest the Draconian manager get into football instead of war – a variation on the “not killing witches will make you happier” line of self-help reasoning she tried on King James.
It’s not like Chibnall made Wilkinson write this. This is presumably a bit of fluff he probably didn’t even see before publication. So what the fuck is in the water in Cardiff that this sort of stuff kept on happening in the Chibnall era? Between “a refugee from the planet Skaro”, the ending of Kerblam!, “he should have been the first billionaire”, the life of Percy Shelley being more important than some servants, and this, genuinely the fuck was going on?
September 3, 2024 @ 8:03 am
As El says, there’s the possibility that “Wilkinson was attempting a Warmongeresque bit of satire”, the likelihood of which I would say is slightly boosted by a) what I have heard about her dissatisfaction re: the writing experience on S11 and b) the various moments in the Witchfinders novelisation which feel like throwing shade on the era’s morals or lampshading this incarnation’s shallowness.
September 2, 2024 @ 9:34 pm
This was fascinating. One of those unstable moments in time?
September 3, 2024 @ 4:26 am
I wasn’t aware this was a thing. Lovely! Thanks for shining some light on such a fascinating moment in DW history.
September 3, 2024 @ 4:36 am
There was also the excellent “Farewell, Sarah Jane” around the same time, which was both an epilogue to The Sarah Jane Adventures and a touching tribute to Elisabeth Sladen. Probably the best of the lot.
September 3, 2024 @ 5:12 am
Has anyone collected the tweetalong threads posted by Moffat and the other contributors?
September 3, 2024 @ 6:30 am
My favourite moments of the Lockdown/Cook era were “The Secret of Novice Hame”, “Farewell Sarah Jane” (interesting, given that I believe RTD once said he wouldn’t kill off Sarah Jane in-canon), “Doctor Who and the Time War” and the insights provided by RTD and Moffat via Twitter.
Also interesting was how RTD wrote that “all stories are real – every story happened” in response to “Doctor Who and the Time War.” Flash forward a couple of years and we have a Tennant minisode in which the Doctor says, “The timelines in the canon are rupturing!” Then we are introduced to the concept of bi-generation and, via commentary, RTD’s headcanon of “what if every Doctor bi-generated, and there are endless alternative timelines out there”, plus the Memory TARDIS. The seeds of RTD2 right there in Lockdown, as he breaks open the Whoniverse’s first seed.
September 3, 2024 @ 2:10 pm
Memories of this period are weird and confusing for me. I was able to work from home without too much impact, but my kids were going to school “remotely” and my spouse was trying to manage her classroom from an impromptu office in the bedroom. Cut off from family and friends, yet we were able to get workmen in to install new high speed internet and deliver a garden shed so long as we kept distance. No particular logic to what was allowed or not. I saw my mother for the last time in a year+ thinking it could easily be the last meeting (it wasn’t) while wandering around supermarkets temporarily empty of pasta. Panic buying of toilet rolls.
Media made valiant attempts to keep going – panel shows were recorded first with very limited audiences, then no audiences at all. At one point “Have I Got News For You” was basically a zoom call. Radio shows recorded from home. I attended theatre script readings using around a virtual table.
Even in those first days, there was a sense of the “Before Time” and “After Time”. Looking back at shows recorded in 2019 or earlier made me think that, Torchwood-style, that this was the time that everything changed. We’ve been through a million strange events since that time, only half a decade ago yet slowly congealing into myth as we watch. I managed, rather like those people in 1946 who would say they had a “good war”. Many did not.
In a world where the word “unprecedented” nearly died of overuse, I will defend the Jodie Sontaran thing. I can’t particularly do so on aesthetic grounds, and I am no fan of Chibnall’s writing. But it did try to offer a little hope and empathy to kids. Is it the only case where Thirteen properly breaks the fourth wall?
Thank you for reading this incoherence.
September 6, 2024 @ 10:15 am
In an act or irony or karma whatever, I post this message and within 24 hours come down with Covid symptoms. Yuck. I don’t need to be reminded.
September 3, 2024 @ 2:20 pm
My main memory of this era is that RTD hosted a Twitter non-competition inviting people to essay Davros’ wonderfully bonkers line “Activate the Reality Bomb!” He posted nice replies to almost all of them (gent that he is) and I posted my unhinged take on it, he replied “Oh, I think you win!” What unalloyed joy!
If Bleach is ever unavailable, they know where to find me – legs and all!
(By the way, thanks to Kate Orman for my long-used screen name!)
September 4, 2024 @ 12:37 pm
At the risk of trivialising the biggest collective trauma of any of our lifetimes… was the pandemic actually a net good for Doctor Who, do we think?
With how the show was trending beforehand, I’m not certain we’d be stood here in 2024 with a version of the show in active production (pending Disney putting any more money in, of course). Without the pandemic, there’s no Davies return, no Whoniverse, no anniversary specials, no Gatwa as the Doctor, no Tales from the TARDIS, no War Between, no Prom… were it not for the Cook era, the present of the show would look vastly different, and I’d probably argue worse (best case scenario, we’d be neck-deep in the McTighe era, and worst case we’d be in the midst of nothing at all).
September 4, 2024 @ 1:02 pm
Ironically, I’m one of the people who thinks the brand as a whole could benefit from having a few years off air, to reset, for the BBC to actively find new talent, people with a new vision, and for people to miss it for a while. shrug
September 4, 2024 @ 1:55 pm
It feels like the show’s in a weird position now whereby if Davies were to die tomorrow the whole thing would be completely dead in the water. Doesn’t feel like the programme’s in an entirely good position if we’re relying on one extremely talented guy to run it indefinitely.
September 4, 2024 @ 2:49 pm
I agree. I wonder if RTD might remain as an exec with Bad Wolf and oversee future eras? Whatever we think about his creative work and scripts, he’s at least very good at holding the fort together, the nuts and bolts of production – his eras certainly seem steadier than chunks of Moffat and Chibnall’s did at times. But then if he does stay, in any capacity, does his shadow just loom over the show indefinitely? Is Doctor Who, essentially, stuck?
September 4, 2024 @ 3:34 pm
The shifting nature of the tv landscape means that nothing gets made that isn’t an auteurist project made by an industry veteran – Doctor Who’s been lucky in that they’ve had two of those to steady the ship both with the clout and the talent, Moffat and Davies. I can’t honestly see the show getting made without either one or both being involved in some capacity. But yeah, the fact that we haven’t really moved onto the show being put in the hands of people born in the 80’s and 90’s is an issue.
September 4, 2024 @ 3:55 pm
The Adventures in Lockdown book was the closest I’ve come since elementary school to recapturing the Scholastic Book Fair.
Getting it in the US was a little difficult, as there weren’t worldwide rights in the book due to the money going to charity. Someone who worked on the book contacted me privately and asked how I even got one.
When it arrived and I ripped the package open, I was hit with a strong smell that was just like a Scholastic Book Fair book, and the texture of the pages felt the same. I felt like I was nine again.
September 6, 2024 @ 10:21 am
Maybe a bit late, but even though twitter continues a downward spiral into cesspittery, it’s still capable of little gems. User “Jeje” (@ daemonsmatt) is already a bit Matt Smith fan, I presume based on HotD or something, and decided to jump into the 11th doctor era with no background info starting at the Eleventh Hour, bingewatching as she goes. There’s a vicarious joy to be found watching someone see the show through fresh eyes.
September 9, 2024 @ 9:40 am
Not only am I going to defend the position that Wilkinson is playing at puckish caprice with her satire on Chibnallian ethics (which imho is what the era most deserves and benefits from; art that takes seriously the challenge of its characters as presented, rather than prettification), but I’ll go one further into the field of controversy and suggest that, to me at least, Cornell’s duology, first in which Benny outlines all the very good reasons to regard Sister-of-Mine as functionally irredeemable and untrustworthy, and second in which Thirteen blithely frees her anyway despite her evident lack of penitence, is… while probably not as completely deconstructionist at least expressing and exploring some ambivalences wrt Jodie’s Doctor as a new kind of ‘good monster’ to what came before.
September 9, 2024 @ 6:45 pm
I meant to comment this last week, but my favorite piece has long been RTD’s Sarah Jane one. After all, SJA ended with an announcement that the show would go on forever, essentially immortalizing the character despite Lis Sladen’s passing. And yet here, during the pandemic, the “shows” slow down and takes the time to reflect on what it has left behind, to give its characters time to reflect on those no longer with us. I don’t know what that means in the arc of Davies’s approach to these topics, but more than any other Lockdown piece, this feels like the one that engages directly with the grim paratext of lockdown, and finds the beautiful humanity among it – which has always been part and parcel of his writing.