Perverting the Course of Human History (War of the Sontarans)
It’s November 7th, 2021. Adele is at number one with “Easy On Me.” Ed Sheeran, Ed Sheeran, and Ed Sheeran also chart. In news, a crowd crush at a Travis Scott concert killed ten, the House of Representatives passes an infrastructure bill designed largely to kill off more progressive bills from passing, and Owen Paterson resigns from Parliament after a report finding that he broke lobbying rules, although not before the Tories consider simply abandoning lobbying rules instead. Also, the phenomenally named Nimblewill Nomad becomes the oldest person to hike the Appalachian Trail.
I probably do some stuff too before grudgingly settling in to watch War of the Sontarans. But you know who it’s really interesting to imagine watching this? Russell T Davies. Really, it’s less this—you assume that, with Power of the Doctor in the can for several weeks, he’d been given pre-air copies of these episodes. You never know though—maybe Chibnall was just that spoilerphobic. By this point, though, Davies was already at work, dreaming of Meeps and Goblins. No, what’s interesting to imagine is Davies sitting down and watching Series 11 and 12 as a fan with no more idea than the rest of us that he’s the next showrunner.
It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Davies—especially given that, despite calling it a Pop Between Realities post for the Capaldi era when I wrote it in 2015, I declined to actually run the essay I wrote on Cucumber/Banana/Tofu during the Capaldi Eruditorum, deeming it a bit too much of a review. But it’s notable that when the Chibnall era debuted that triptych of shows in 2015 and the three-episode A Very English Scandal earlier in 2018 were the only significant pieces of television writing Davies had done since the end of Torchwood.
The explanation for this is simple. In 2011, right in the midst of Miracle Day airing, his husband Andrew Smith was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer and given less than a year to live. Davies put all of his television work on hold and returned to Manchester to care for him. Cucumber was largely written—it had been developed as a BBC/Showtime co-production and was in the process of casting when Smith got sick and Davies pulled the plug. Piers Wegner got him to bring it to Channel 4, and it shot in Manchester.
At the end of September 2018, just over six years after his year to live, Smith passed. By this time Davies had already started his way back towards regular work—he’d made A Very English Scandal, and his next project, Years and Years, was on the brink of starting shooting. But before that, just over a week after Smith’s death, came The Woman Who Fell to Earth.
As I said, it’s worth imagining Davies watching these episodes. It’s implausible to imagine he didn’t recognize that Chibnall was fucking it up. This is a man who obsesses over how sets for people’s houses should have crap sitting on the staircases to look more lived in. He’s not going to have missed that The Battle of Ray-Bans and Keggers forgot to earn any of its emotional beats. That said, I don’t imagine Davies to have been a particularly savage critic. Chris Chibnall is first and foremost his friend and colleague, and one doubts he had any emotions about watching him fail so badly on their mutual favorite show beyond just feeling sad about it.
No, the thing I imagine when I picture Davies watching all of this is him constantly thinking through how he’d do it. One gets the sense he does this at baseline, even about television he’s enjoying. But sitting in a house that’s suddenly far too empty no matter how many friends he’s invited over, watching The Ghost Monument or whatever, one imagines the repeated “fuck up the basics” inadequacies of the Chibnall era and their potential solutions would have echoed almost uncontrollably in his head. It’s barely less inevitable than his grief doing so.
You figure there’s got to be this entire shadow Chibnall era—the one that exists only in Davies’ head and perhaps some text messages to his mates. No more detailed than the Leekley era, perhaps, but undoubtedly there. Like poor Penny in Partners in Crime we can see its shadows—obviously The Timeless Children would have stuck larger and more mind-wrenchingly than the rest, with Davies at once transfixed by its potential and vexed by its production. Ironically, he’s the one person who seems to have been substantially influenced by the Chibnall era.
But like the rest of us after a loss, he got up and went back to work. First, as mentioned, was Years and Years—a generational family saga about transhumanism and the rise of fascism. This was ambitious as it was blatantly uncommercial; in some ways the best thing about it is that it casually set fire to a bunch of HBO co-production money to have Lydia West salvage the line “I’m not transsexual, I’m transhuman.” Much like Cucumber, there’s a glorious decadence to it—a willingness to indulge Davies’ whims.
It’s impossible, however, not to notice the underlying theme of death running through it. The series ends with one of the characters dying and having her consciousness uploaded to the cloud, with a final ambiguity over whether it worked, her closing monologue before she goes through with it being a declaration that she doesn’t think it will because “I’m not a piece of code. I’m not information. All these memories, they’re not just facts, they’re so much more than that. They’re my family. And my lover. They’re my mum, and my brother who died years ago. They’re love. That’s what I’m becoming now. Love. I am love.” It’s easy to see how Davies got from the death of his husband to that.
His next project was even more to the point. Davies had been talking about doing a drama about the AIDS crisis since he was promoting Cucumber in 2015, but it took until August 2018 to actually get commissioned, after initially being passed on by all of Channel 4, the BBC, and ITV before Channel 4 finally changed its mind. Even then there were compromises. Davies wanted eight episodes, while Channel 4 was willing to give him four—they settled on five.
From the start, back in 2015, Davies was open about the fact that his interest in finally writing about AIDS—a topic he conspicuously avoided in Queer as Folk—was motivated by the fact that his husband was dying. But this is not, fundamentally, a show about that grief in the way that Years and Years ultimately was. It’s a show about illness, certainly—one of the series’ tour de force sequences sees the shocking illness and death of Colin, one of the main characters. Davies obscures the possibility of this, spending two episodes calling attention to the degree to which Colin the shy and awkward one so that the possibility of his illness can blindside the viewer in the third. Colin’s illness is shocking in its brutality, culminating in a death that Davies based on his husband’s last days.
But it is not about what death is in the sense that Years and Years’s meditations on the nature of consciousness or, for that matter, like Cucumber’s similar tour de force sequence, the harrowing sixth episode and its focus on the full weight of Lance’s death. It is instead coldly material—a record of specific deaths in specific times, always accompanied by Davies giving copious interviews about how he knew people whose families buried them without ever acknowledging they died of AIDS, how he knew about parents who discovered their son was gay, had AIDS, and was dying all in the same day, how there was a real Pink Palace and a real Jill Baxter who tirelessly stood by the bedsides of dying gay men and advocated for their care.
And indeed, it’s a mistake to suggest that Davies’ late career fixation on death reduces entirely to the loss of his husband. It’s not like Miracle Day, the project he was working on when Smith fell ill, wasn’t about death. Nor that The Second Coming or Casanova weren’t. Even Queer as Folk had the gut punch early death of Phil of an overdose, a development based not only on Davies’ own overdose (in the wake of which he vowed to settle down, then did) but as a tacit metaphor for AIDS, the man supplying the drugs being named Harvey, like HIV. (“Never tell anyone that” declared Nichola Shindler when Davies told her that; she went on to produce Cucumber, Years and Years, and It’s a Sin.) His work has always been haunted by death, and by the way it consumes queer lives—not just people, but lives. Hence the conclusion of the series, in which the main character’s death goes unseen, locked away in his parents’ house, his friends barred from seeing him so that the audience finds out along with them, told coldly by his mother, who’s tangibly ashamed of him.
Perhaps improbably, it was a smash hit. In some ways it was helped by filming—it wrapped just a few months before COVID, and was released with a drop of all five episodes on All Four, which then aired weekly on Channel 4 itself. Bingeable at a time when binging television was about all one could do, at once worthy and topical, and perhaps most importantly incredibly well reviewed, the show caught fire domestically, then again internationally. Davies’ elegy for the erased queers of his generation positioned him, once again, to do whatever he wanted.
Which, it turned out, was to return to Doctor Who. He’s framed this in terms of Smith’s death as well, describing it as a comfort to be doing work that was familiar to his husband. But this can scarcely be the whole of his reasons. Perhaps the Chibnall era was simply so vexing or the alternatives in his head so delicious that he couldn’t resist. Perhaps, seeing the show in a bad moment where mismanagement could make it a far worse moment, he simply felt obliged to do what he could. Perhaps he just didn’t feel like pitching new projects, or was interested in pushing queer representation further than had been allowed in the 00s.
There’s a defense I’ve seen of the Chibnall era that those who like it do so because in its vagueness there’s vast amounts of room to project interiority onto the characters—that there’s room for headcanons all over the place. We are faced with a similar situation here—a situation in which we know only the broadest of strokes, which in turn simply tantalize about all the rest. Except that instead of being pointless, as speculating about the interiority of fictional characters ultimately is, trying to fill in the details here risks being outright ghoulish. We’ll never know the thought process that went into Davies’ return, any more than we’ll ever know who it was that he sacked and replaced on what became Tooth and Claw, or what actually went down between Moffat and Caro Skinner.
But for my part, and this is in some ways less what I think than what I choose to believe, I reckon it comes down to that shadow era living in his head. I think that, coming off a show about how death robbed a generation of queers of their identities, he looked at this thing in his head and simply didn’t want it to vanish. And why not? At the end of the day, Davies loves Doctor Who. It’s an arbitrary thing to love, but so’s a customs officer you see across the club one night. So’s everything we love. That’s what makes it love.
Heavens, we didn’t talk about War of the Sontarans at all, did we?
September 23, 2024 @ 6:26 am
How fortuitous that this is the story in which Yaz looks at what she’s written on her hand and asks herself the question Chibnall, and perhaps the BBC top brass, and then the man himself, must have been posing themselves for several years: What Would The Davies Do?
September 23, 2024 @ 8:37 am
More seriously, as instalments of Flux go this one even comes close to having actual unity of theme. Whereas the Azure segments with Bel in Village of the Angels don’t really connect to anything in the 1960s village, here there is at least a line to be drawn between the alternate history that’s resulted from all the, uh, perverting that the Sontarans are doing, and the way Swarm and Azure are disrupting the usual linear containment of Time with their actions towards the Mouri in the episode’s other major setting – both are fundamentally about an anarchic disruption to that which is safely, carefully controlled, measured, recorded. Which is very Chibnallian so he’s nothing if not in character here, I guess.
In both cases there’s a sense of the anarchic disruption being where the central fun of the episode’s play lies — from the Sontaran who picked the Crimean War purely cos he wanted to ride a horse to the gleeful camp with which Swarm and Azure are costumed and performed. Alas, this only makes the Doctor & co.’s values and actions come across as all the more stodgy and head-prefect-like.
September 23, 2024 @ 7:16 am
“There’s a defense I’ve seen of the Chibnall era that those who like it do so because in its vagueness there’s vast amounts of room to project interiority onto the characters—that there’s room for headcanons all over the place.”
I’m absolutely convinced of this. What is there, ultimately, to the Chibnall era? A blast of meaningless noise with the vague but persistent whiff of generic Doctor Who. If you’re the sort of person who thinks Doctor Who is your “comfort television”, who really just wants to submerge yourself in the warmth of your nostalgia for it, then you can see whatever you want in it.
September 23, 2024 @ 12:20 pm
I wondered last week why you didn’t do all Flux at once, and now I understand.
September 23, 2024 @ 12:24 pm
I felt like the precedent of Trial meant I had to do Flux as individual posts with some sort of formal conceit. And it certainly wasn’t going to be one that involved me writing 12,000 words about it.
September 23, 2024 @ 2:37 pm
I would love to see 12000 words about Flux, but I would not wish to inflict the writing of it on anyone. I wonder if I could convince ChatGPT to write it instead. Or would would it remind me of that when the robots rise up against us…
September 23, 2024 @ 2:48 pm
Remind me, are you a Patron? 😂
September 23, 2024 @ 3:20 pm
Because she basically did.
September 23, 2024 @ 2:36 pm
I like this one!
September 23, 2024 @ 2:41 pm
This applies for both the episode and the review!
September 23, 2024 @ 2:48 pm
It might actually be the best-working bit of Flux in practice, yeah.
September 28, 2024 @ 4:00 am
Great piece! Can’t wait to read the next.
September 23, 2024 @ 3:16 pm
This one enraged me because it had the Doctor getting Mary Seacole to do reconnaisance work observing the Sontaran forces – thus taking a nurse and setting her to do the work of a spy.
The Red Cross get very, very upset – for completely understandable and eminently justified reasons – when people blur the line between humanitarian medics and military/intelligence personnel, and the Doctor just did that.
Plus it kind of represents the final collapse of the Chibnall approach to historicals: for all we can criticise Rosa or Demons of the Punjab or The Witchfinders, they at least present the historical context of the period they’re dealing in a way which is meant to be at least somewhat informative, even if they don’t necessarily stick the landing. This aspect fades a little in the Series 12 historicals but is still visible. Here, though, it’s gone. The context of the Crimean War is gone because, of course, the Sontarans have gone and potatoed the course of human history. And shorn of the context she existed in, Seacole is no longer Seacole, just as none of us would be the people we are if you completely changed the world and society we lived in during our formative years.
September 23, 2024 @ 3:19 pm
And by the time of Madame Ching the Pirate Queen, she might as well be completely fictional rather than historical because she’s basically just the name and extremely vague concept of “pirate queen”.
September 23, 2024 @ 7:13 pm
The version seen in Episode 1 of Waititi’s “Time Bandits” series is a more historically accurate portrayal, and she’s a joke character called “Madame Chung”.
(Given that the show features a middle-aged blonde woman as its lead Time Bandit — one, to boot, with a running joke where she insists that she’s not formally the leader then expects her companions to follow her every direction anyway — one honestly has to wonder if Waititi, too, subjected himself to ChibWho and decided to deliberately show it up/spoof it/some alchemical combination of both.)
September 24, 2024 @ 11:44 am
Lisa Kudrow is also a much stronger and complex anarchically unreliable Doctor-ish character than Whittaker’s actual Doctor ever became. Talk about alternative histories.
September 24, 2024 @ 6:22 pm
Hell, Kevin is a stronger 13th Doctor.
September 25, 2024 @ 6:32 am
Convinced me to watch that show, you did.
September 23, 2024 @ 4:32 pm
As for Seacole, this struck me as one of those moments of Chibnall having a semblance of being progressive that just deteriorated into a bunch of wikipedia factoids about the woman pushed into a Sontaran alternate history about which I remember even less. She’s BLACK! She’s a WOMAN! She DID STUFF! Yes, but what was the point of her in the STORY? Yes, she was forgotten in the early 20th century but was rediscovered in the last few decades, to the point where she’s been a (minor) figure in the national curriculum. Maybe I’m mean to say that Seacole had no memorable moments in the script, because I’m darned if I can remember much about any of it. It’s like Praxeus or Can You Hear Me, a bland custard of television with no texture.
September 23, 2024 @ 7:19 pm
I guess extending her principled duty-of-care to caring for a wounded Sontaran, even as he protests, is a good premise for putting her in a Doctor Who story. The problem is that Chibnall landed on that premise, wrote it out, then had no idea what more to do with it.
September 23, 2024 @ 3:31 pm
I just hated this episode for the fact that it made the Sontarans boring. The idea that the were a bit naff was their biggest selling point in NuWho. From poor doomed Ross Jenkins noting that they look like potatoes in The Sontaran Stratagem to, well, nearly every line Strax uttered, the selling point for the Sontarans is that they are a race of narrowminded militaristic idiots punching above their weight class due to tech and infinite numbers.
So naturally, Chibnall (whose views about the Sontarans as a concept was probably fixed somewhere between Invasion of Time and the Two Doctor) brings them back in his last season and somehow makes them able to outwit both the Daleks and the Cybermen. Fanwank. Nothing but fanwank.
September 23, 2024 @ 5:53 pm
Yeah, you could kinda feel the basement-dweller contingent punching the air that Chibnall had finally done the Sontarans “right”, restoring them to their proper place as a very serious and non-ridiculous enemy to be considered among the franchise’s main serious and non-ridiculous villains like the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Yeti and the Quarks.
September 23, 2024 @ 7:17 pm
I think that’s a stretch, talking about the serial with “CHO… CO… LATE”. I think Chibnall is quite good at writing the Sontarans, and is well aware that they are ridiculous. Them beating the Daleks and Cybermen strikes me as the work of the man who planned to change the killer in ‘Broadchurch’ if it leaked — a completely arbitrary rug-pull to Subvert Expectations — moreso than evidence of a personal belief that Sontarans are cool and would totally beat Batman in a fight, I mean Spider-Man, I mean the Daleks. Though no doubt there are a few idiots out there who interpreted it as such.
September 23, 2024 @ 7:59 pm
As a big Sontar-Stan, I do feel the need to add onto this by pointing out that them silly and a bit rubbish was established as far back as Time Warrior: the very first scene of a Sontaran ever wherein Linx, one lone alien invader, steps out of a spaceship, plops down a flag and self-importantly declares Earth to be under the Sontaran empire’s control was exactly how Marvin the Martian was first introduced 25 years earlier. Given that the rest of the Time Meddler is clearly meant to be amusing, starting with a well-known Looney Tunes gag about aliens is a perfect set-up.
Only in the decades after when it became capital-l Lore about A Faction That Exist In The Whoniverse (and admittedly, later appearances playing them straighter) did perspective mutate into the idea that they’re supposed to be super serious space badasses, much like how almost everything else deliberately funny in Classic Who seems to be swept under the rug.
September 23, 2024 @ 8:00 pm
Me typing “Time Meddler” when talking about Time Warrior is a mistake I make every single time, whoopsie
September 23, 2024 @ 10:11 pm
Doctor Who fans have a longstanding tradition of not being able to tell when something is a joke. See also the people who didn’t realize that naming the Time Lord covert ops organization the “Celestial Intervention Agency” was supposed to make them come off as ridiculous.
September 24, 2024 @ 5:20 am
I think in classic Who the Sontarans were always written as just slightly ridiculous. The Sontaran Experiment has them outwitted by the Doctor telling the Grand Marshall that he can’t invade without Styre’s report , one of Holmes’ regular digs at bureaucracy and also Styre’s “I will kill you all…but first I have more important things to do” line, and Invasion of Time has a cockney Sontaran declaring the TARDIS as “a load of obsolete rubbish”. In The Two Doctors they are just there in teh background because Holmes didn’t really want to include them.
September 24, 2024 @ 5:21 am
I think in classic Who the Sontarans were always written as just slightly ridiculous. The Sontaran Experiment has them outwitted by the Doctor telling the Grand Marshall that he can’t invade without Styre’s report , one of Holmes’ regular digs at bureaucracy and also Styre’s “I will kill you all…but first I have more important things to do” line, and Invasion of Time has a cockney Sontaran declaring the TARDIS as “a load of obsolete rubbish”. In The Two Doctors they are just there in the background because Holmes didn’t really want to include them.
September 24, 2024 @ 10:01 pm
The Marvin comparison…I’d never gotten that, what a brilliant connection. 😀
September 23, 2024 @ 4:54 pm
My favourite bit of this episode is a quick shot of a map of Europe that shows Poland as an independent country with weird alternate borders. Which tacitly suggests that in this timeline Poland was able to cut a sweet sweet deal with Sontar and regain its independence 70 years early, which, as you can probably guess from my username, I find very funny.
September 24, 2024 @ 4:58 am
I recall being told that the concept in this one of Russia turning into Sontar and the British army fighting Sontarans instead of Russians actually met with quite good humour among Russian fandom, with the central joke being “lol we’ve swapped out one lot of militaristic strongman brutes for another, same difference”
September 23, 2024 @ 7:46 pm
The first (and often only) thing I remember about this story is not only was there was SO little contact between Chibnall and the other branches of Doctor Who that both he and Briggs used the really specific word “Ravagers” for separate things at the exact same time – I recall the fevered excitement and interest at getting a Big Finish/Show connection, because no one considered they’d be so clumsy and out of step – Big Finish beat Flux to the punch of doing a Mary Seacole historical by an entire year.
September 24, 2024 @ 10:02 am
I think Chibnall has a fairly strong “if it’s not on TV it doesn’t count” mentality. He had no qualms about overwriting an entire Eighth Doctor companion in Haunting of Villa Diodati.
And to be fair, there’s some justification for this approach. Most people who watch Doctor Who don’t listen to the audios, there’s so many of them that making sure to avoid contradicting them is a lot of work, sometimes they are very stupid (also true of TV stories, but those are harder to get away with ignoring), and sometimes they just get in the way of the story you want to tell.
If Peri reappears on the TV show and mentions that the Fifth Doctor died for her even though he had just met her, that would contradict a bunch of Big Finish stories – but it’s hard to say that would be the fault of the TV show, as opposed to the fault of Big Finish for undermining the original emotional core of Caves of Androzani.
September 24, 2024 @ 11:04 am
In fairness, in this particular case I don’t think the issue is so much “ugh, Chibnall doesn’t keep up to date on the audio content and he steamrollered over its continuity” or “Chibnall doesn’t care about the EU” as that there’s actually supposed to be someone liaising between Cardiff and the various licensees and spotting issues and contradictions where any arise at the story lining level. The fact that there are SO many such awkward overlaps and doubling ups during the Chibnall era indicates that this responsibility fell by the wayside – as noted above there’s two Mary Seacole stories (TV and audio) but there’s also two Ada Lovelace stories, two secret origins of where the power of regeneration comes from, two lots of Ravagers, approving the Ace book then using her in Power of the Doctor which flatly retcons it, and so on. And that’s even before we get into all the stuff like the Series 11 EU content not knowing how Muslim Yaz was or wasn’t so they couldn’t write it into their fiction or other S11 adjacent EU writers just blithely going with the Doctor having told the fam all about Gallifrey, contrary to Spyfall, simply because no one was there to tell them that this wasn’t happening that season (which implies it was not an active plan that she was being secretive about such things until they came to work on S12).
One wonders whether there was nobody really doing that job anymore, or whether spoilerphobia had become so all-consuming that it extended even to not telling the EU writers details that they needed to know, or whether scripts were often planned out and written so late that these contradictions started multiplying, as what wasn’t an issue a month or two ago suddenly became one.
September 24, 2024 @ 11:50 am
All I want to know is whether it’s canon now that Nyssa eventually made her way back to Earth and married Tegan, and what that means for the frankly shocking level of chemistry between Tegan and Ace in PotD.
September 24, 2024 @ 6:18 pm
Obligatory “there’s no canon,” but Tegan mentions it in her Tales of the TARDIS episode, so that’s probably as close to canon as you can get.
September 28, 2024 @ 7:46 am
Probably a dead thread by now, but I was more surprised by the level of chemistry between ace and graham (who, i was shocked to realize, were played by actors with only a 2 year age gap) who I basically ship at this point.
September 24, 2024 @ 4:30 pm
“There’s a defense I’ve seen of the Chibnall era that those who like it do so because in its vagueness there’s vast amounts of room to project interiority onto the characters—that there’s room for headcanons all over the place.”
I’m very much looking forward to Elizabeth’s take on the Doctor-Yaz shipping that became rather a central element of the queer fandom of the show. For a lot of reasons (in my view, choices Mandip Gill made about how to react to some parts of Whittaker’s performance, and Whittaker’s general aura of lesbian energy in her wardrobe and Doctor mannerisms), a lot of fan’s headcanons read some very deep emotions into their characters’ connection. None of it was on the screen, but it became really visible in fan community discourse.
September 24, 2024 @ 8:38 pm
It’s easy to imagine RTD watching Chibs’ historicals, which have the approach of aiming to shine a different light on history, highlighting stories of minorities oft overlooked… as Davies himself brings out a hugely successful mini series doing just that.
RTD of course has naturally been heading to writing It’s a Sin for a long time. I’m not suggesting these two things are linked in the slightest. But, it’s perhaps worth pointing to it as an example of how you tell a historical story highlighting forgotten people, whilst not letting that become the goal in itself.
It’s a Sin does reflect on lives lost, yes. But it’s not just informative: it has ‘aboutness’ as you term it. It’s brutal and angry. It doesn’t just make you feel sad, it makes you feel robbed and provokes thought.
Chibs’ historicals didn’t have to be political in the same way but would’ve been nice if the “mary seacole sontaran romp” made me feel/think anything about Mary Seacole or sontarans.
It was broadly enjoyable tho. There were some silly gags. You take what you can get in this era. 🥔 🐎
September 25, 2024 @ 5:26 am
RTD very much writing about his own history – or a time he lived through – with ‘It’s a Sin’. Same with ‘A Very English Scandal’, Jeremy Thorpe’s story, which I think intrigued him as a new story when he was younger. And for that matter, ‘Nollie’, which was his own Crossroads obsession put on screen. It could be argued at all RTD’s celebrity historicals in Doctor Who are similar. All the celebs in question are actually writers (maybe RTD’s favourites?), and we enter those writer’s worlds.
Chibnall, on the other hand … I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d noticed that ‘Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls’ (a trendy book in the mid 2010s) was on the shelves everywhere. A collection of single-page chapters, each giving a short bio of a famous woman from history. Rosa Parks is in there, as is Ada Lovelace (as indeed are Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher) and thought it might be a direction for Doctor Who. i.e. a kind of ‘IMPORTANT woman of the week’ popping up in various stories. I don’t, however, see much in Chibnall’s stories which indicate that he had personal feelings towards Parks, Lovelace, Mary Shelley, or Seacole.
September 25, 2024 @ 6:44 am
Good point. Zheng Yi Sao (Madame Ching, the Pirate Queen) and Noor Inyat Khan are the ones that stick out at me as much less well-known interesting people. And then we learn f all about them. Even the educational remit seems to fail with those. Goodnight Stories sounds preferable.
September 25, 2024 @ 7:22 am
And anyway, how come Mary Seacole gets to retain her memories of the Doctor, yet Ada Lovelace and Noor don’t? Eh. Chibnall, are you okay?
October 1, 2024 @ 7:56 pm
To be fair, this is arguably not even the “real” Mary Seacole, she’s the Mary Seacole from an alternate timeline where Sontar has replaced Russia… though odds are Chibnall just forgot he was in the habit of erasing famous women’s memories of the Doctor in the general clusterfuck of Flux.
October 1, 2024 @ 8:05 pm
The Clusterflux!
September 26, 2024 @ 11:33 am
Hmm. I’m thinking that with Flux, it becomes clear that as far as a Qlippothic shell of Doctor Who, Chinball’s run is closer to CyberBill: the shell isn’t actually emptied out and its occupant needs rescuing by a queer entity that can travel between worlds effortlessly.
That leaves open multiple modes of engagement. El’s seems pretty far along the lines of “tired” to “really f-ing tired” and that makes sense; the alternate mode of response is anger. I know my responses ranged from fatigue to fury that Chibnall had taken one or more really interesting ideas, wasted them, and also pretty much made it impossible for the show to try that story again for a while. (All Cops Are Daleks is a story that just isn’t getting a second chance.) If you’re tired, what’s to say about Can You Hear Me?, besides maybe “no, I turned the volume down after the first ten minutes”. If you’re angry, it’s an episode that wastes a chance at actual companion character development, at myth intersecting the show, at bringing back the Eternals in a season which could hint the Doctor is the child of an Eternal but doesn’t bother. There’s so much more to say about the Eternals (just drawing on Enlightenment), but in Chibnall’s Age of No Reason it doesn’t get said. The rich potential of the story you can imagine gets displaced but not erased by the empty shell of a story Chibnall puts before us. Bill’s still in there; somebody has to transform her to get her out.
September 27, 2024 @ 4:16 pm
Nicely put.
September 27, 2024 @ 3:24 am
The thing I found oddest at the time was what I assume was Chibnall’s choice to go back to the Sontaran design of the seventies rather than the nu-Who design. Unless the casts had all been destroyed or he couldn’t find the keys to the BBC Cardiff props cupboard it seemed bizarre that he’d go for a look that would confuse any kids still engaged with the show who had fond memories of Strax. And this one week after introducing a new race that looked like it was supposed to be a man wearing a teddy-bear costume rather than a race of dog people.
September 27, 2024 @ 3:14 pm
I’ll be honest, I never liked the blue design or their weird human muscle suits so I’m fine with that particular oddness on Chibnall’s part. 😀
As for the Lupari design confusion, I don’t know…
September 29, 2024 @ 5:21 am
Fans often say one of Chibnall’s strengths was classic monsters – but, really, what do the Sontarans do in his era that they haven’t already done? The reversion back to the classic design is nothing more than fannish want, and the masks aren’t even that good compared to the 2008 ones. The Cybermen… flimsy spike boys replaced by frowny spike boys with capes and Gallifreyan elephant ears??? Ashad is the only creation worthy of any note, and even Chibnall didn’t realise his potential since he killed him off and later had to hit CTRL-Z. And Daleks are just pew pew Daleks in his era, nothing really new or special, and it’s not until their last appearance that we get the plunger back. Weeping Angels also get new, terrible masks. Judoon just Judoon, and the less said about the Sea Devils the better.