Qui Quae Quod (The Witchfinders)
It’s November 25th, 2018. Ariana Grande continues to be on top of a top ten chart that is basically unaltered from last week save for a couple minor shufflings of position—Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper, Rita Ora, and Dave ft Fredo fall, Jess Glynne and Little Mix ft. Nicki Minaj rise. It is again the definition of a slow news week, dominated by the slow fallout of Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination nearly two months earlier and the release of yet another one of those scientific reports that tries very hard to stress that we are all going to die unless we do something about climate change, followed, inevitably, by a lack of doing anything. Past that, it’s so tedious that The New York Times runs a front-page story on the forced retirement of drug-sniffing dogs in the wake of cannabis legalization, at least until the day this airs, when the European Union finally signs off on a Brexit agreement. Spoilers: it’s going to remain a fucking clown show.
On television, meanwhile, The Witchfinders. Let’s start at the core of this episode. A celebrity historical with a prominent and acclaimed guest actor is a particularly good vehicle for the tradition whereby, early in a new Doctor’s run, they are given a scene with a skilled veteran actor to see what happens. Eccleston got it with Simon Callow, Tennant with Pauline Collins and Anthony Head, Smith with Ian McNeice and Iain Glen, and Coleman with Peter Capaldi. With Rosa being about the weighty weight of its weighty political issues instead of the actors, it takes Whittaker until her second celebrity historical to get to do this, and she ends up drawing Alan Cumming, making his first appearance in Doctor Who since 1993 as King James I. There’s a standard issue Doctor Who episode going on at the fringes of this, but the point of the episode—the reason it exists and wants you to tune into it—is because of the scene where King James interrogates the Doctor.
Up to this point, Cumming has been turning in a carefully mannered comedy performance. This is an interesting quirk of the script, which sets King James up as, essentially, a comedy interruptor, showing up and ensuring that the Doctor can’t straightforwardly take charge of the situation. Cumming’s performance is high grade camp, deftly moderated so as not to devour the rural horror tale around it. It’s an interesting performance, because its relative restraint serves to give Whittaker a lot to work with, but it still sets up an interesting problem—an unusual sort of character to interface with.
So what do we get when it’s finally time for the two of them to face off? Hm. Well, Alan Cumming is great, a font of tiny reactions and subtly shifting emotions. But Whittaker… OK, sure she’s not helped by a script that demands she deliver lines like “true knowledge has to be earned.” And perhaps this can all be laid at the feet of Chibnall’s Davison revivalism. But when Peter Davison played a weirdly passive Doctor he still imbued the part with the basic level of mercury it demands—his Doctor seemed to be doing things. Whittaker, meanwhile, plays the Doctor as… bored. Look at the bit in the beginning, where she’s given the very standard Doctorish set of rapid dialogue reversals—“If I was Satan’s agent, do you seriously think a bit of rope would stop me? I say a bit, quite a lot. Tightly bound. It’s pretty painful. They know how to tie a knot in this part of the world.” And look at the, well… lack of reversals across it. Aside from “I say a bit, quite a lot,” every line just is just a reiteration of the one before with a slightly different detail. It’s a shockingly static monologue.
Later, after the pointless interstitial with the fam, the scene’s tone changes, and Whittaker gets to do what is, in practice, the bit of the part she’s best at—the kind of yearning earnestness with which she takes absolutely dogshit dialogue like “I know because we’re all the same. We want certainty, security, to believe that people are evil or heroic. But that’s not how people are. You want to know the secrets of existence? Start with the mysteries of the heart” and elevates it to, well, sincere dogshit. Whittaker is legitimately quite good at these moralizing speeches, which is a waste given that she’s working in a completely amoral era. But she’s good at them in the sense of having a trick that always works, much like David Tennant can do “the Doctor is depressed” in exactly one bluntly effective way, and unlike Tennant, she doesn’t have a second one.
And it’s here we’re forced to confront one of the common takes on this era among what we might call its quasi-defenders—the large mass of critics, often working for fansites or mainstream outlets used to engaging in access journalism who thus default towards liking everything, and who attempted to hone moderate “it’s not great but it’s still fun” takes on the era. This is the claim that Whittaker could have done better with better material. And on one level that’s absolutely true, because that’s the nature of better material. But I suspect the truth of the Whittaker era is that Whittaker wasn’t the problem, as opposed to that Whittaker was good. She was absolutely sandbagged by scripts that gradually went from terrible to completely disengaged, but every Doctor has at least one complete stinker of an episode. Pull up The Lie of the Land or The Dominators and you’ll see Capaldi and Troughton trying and at times even succeeding at elevating a bad episode into a bad episode with good acting. Pull up most of the Whittaker era and you’ll see…
I mean, mostly what you’ll see is an actress who looked at three entire seasons of Broadchurch and said “may I have another?” No matter how you try to cut the Chibnall era, the fact of the matter is that Whittaker, by all appearances, was all-in on what Chibnall was doing. Maybe behind the scenes stories will eventually leak and it’ll become clear that this was actually an era riven by all manner of fighting among the creative principles, but for the most part it seems as though Whittaker was passionate about the part and putting her best effort into producing her best work. And yet it never really flares into life, lingering in a basic “yeah, you’re doing the job all right” competency for three seasons.
None of this is to understate the paucity of what she’s given to work with. There’s only so much you can do with a story that clumsily deflates into “oh crap, we’re eight minutes from the end, we’d better throw in some monsters so generic we actually called them the Morax.” There’s less when that episode is still fairly part of what can be straightfacedly called the good part of your era. This is better constructed than Chibnall’s baseline, but it has the same failure to achieve “aboutness” that everything save Demons of the Punjab has.
But even in the face of that, you can look at Alan Cumming. He is, after all, similarly terribly served. He’s the expensive guest cast, but he has no emotional arc. His job is simply to frustrate the Doctor so that it takes until the climax for her to find the Morax, which, notably, she doesn’t even do so much as stand there whilst the Morax show up—to ensure that she can’t actually investigate the mystery. This is dressed up in a comedy bit, which is a perfectly sound decision to make if you’re stuck with a character whose sole purpose is to be a particularly elaborate boulder, and the decision to cast someone that good pretty much does the perfect job of actually covering up the sheer pointlessness of the role, but at the end of the day the part is firmly a bad idea that they successfully bail out by casting Alan Cumming.
Hell, look at the rest of the regulars. Tosin Cole is admittedly usually defeated by the material, but he has the perverse decency to at least appear checked out. He realizes quickly that it’s never getting as good as his opening scene again, and that he is now little more than a modern-day Nicola Bryant, left to perform whatever miscellaneous plot functions are available and be charismatic about it. You can almost see him shrug here and go “himbo it is then.” It’s unsuccessful, but respectable in its efficiency.
Bradley Walsh, meanwhile, is left to be the veteran. He settles on a kind of genial consultant role, in part born of the fact that he’s conspicuously given a week off every couple of filming blocks, meaning he is almost always relegated to the b-plot. He gets that his job is thus to make unfunny comedy more or less work—a job he has decades of experience at—and to hit occasional emotional beats. He approaches these beats with sincerity, sells the hell out of them, then gets on the train to London to shoot The Chase.
And then there’s Mandip Gill, who has already worked out the broad scope of what she is going to be dealing with for the next five years of her life. Admittedly, her character is the one observation you really do have to hand to Chibnall, which is that to make such an overstuffed TARDIS crew work you need to be able to have a character who can function as a secondary Doctor. Except, of course, that this is just the realization Moffat had seven years earlier with the River/Amy/Rory team. (I’d cite Bill/Nardole/Missy, but that would require any evidence Chibnall watched the Capaldi era.) Still, kudos to Chibnall for successfully identifying a thing that made Doctor Who work better, you know?
In any case, Gill has the savvy to recognize that if she can figure out how to make this part work reliably enough there’s a higher profile role waiting for her down the line. She’s too old for Kamala Khan, but there’s got to be something in the MCU she can do, right? Or Star Wars maybe? That new Game of Thrones thing? And so, in every scene she gets she goes about adding a nice set of layers and activity to it. She’s rarely given enough space to steal one, but if you pull up a random sequence of this or most other episodes you’ll see her finding ways to make it work, to add a bit of depth to it. In other words, she’s reliably doing what Jodie Whittaker isn’t, being the one member of the cast who tries to drag the show, kicking and screaming, into some realm of quality.
None of this, to state the flamingly obvious just so this article doesn’t get circulated by a bunch of quasi-nazi dipshits, is a case against a female Doctor. But it is a case against this female Doctor. Absent the welcome transformative nature of her casting it’s difficult to articulate what Whittaker brings to the part. In this regard, she’s the perfect actress for Chibnalls’ vision of the show, since he doesn’t seem to want her to bring anything to the part.
Which brings us, in a way, back around to The Witchfinders, a story notable as the one time in the Chibnall era that the Doctor’s gender is actually engaged with. Which is to say that this is the story where the Doctor is humorously subjected to extended sexism and kept from being effective by people who won’t listen to a woman. On one level this needed to happen—it would have been dishonest to never engage with sexism, and it’s for the best that it happened in one of the three episodes of the Chibnall era to feature a solo writing credit for a woman. But it’s fundamentally stunning to realize this was it. The only actual idea they had going for making the Doctor a woman—the only reason they could think of to do it beyond the headline-grabbing sake of it—was so that she could experience sexism. This is the whole of Chibnall’s conception of womanhood—an affliction he ironically shares with TERFs. It would, in many ways, have been better to simply not do a female Doctor than to do it this badly. As always, the only thing worse than Chibnall’s horrifying lack of ideas proves to be his ideas.
February 26, 2024 @ 5:49 am
It doesn’t cover itself in glory either but I would argue Thasmin as the other bit of the Chibnall era which specifically accounts for the Doctor being a woman. It’s very specifically a weaksauce rendition of an outdated “repressed sapphic yearning” narrative, and would scan very differently if the Doctor was male.
(As for that alien universe where the Thirteenth Doctor and Yaz are both men, it’s a truism that mainstream media are, for various questionable reasons, quicker to foreground WLW relationships than MLM. I don’t think there’s a world where the first gay male Doctor romance is put on television by anyone short of RTD. So maybe this cashes out in one of the uses of making the Doctor a woman being to facilitate the First Gay Doctor Romance? Which is something. Of course the plotline is a damp squib and we know it wasn’t the plan until very late in the game, but…)
February 26, 2024 @ 10:55 am
if we count Thasmin, then surely we must count The Doctor/Captain Jack or The Doctor/The Master?
as for the truism, i found the 2021-2022 GLAAD report on LGBTQ representation on TV; this was the first time in its history that lesbian characters outnumbered the gay ones (40‐35)
February 26, 2024 @ 5:34 pm
Eh. In terms of NuWho tropes, Thasmin is the Doctor/companion relationship or almost-relationship of its era — the Rose/Doctor, the Martha/Doctor, the Amy/Doctor, the Clara/Doctor — in a way which the other two were not. The first on-screen gay spin on “the romantic tension between The Doctor and The Companion” is still a notable milestone, I feel, in terms of public perception, even if there are important technicallies and footnote… in much the same way that Ncuti Gatwa is still The First Black Doctor in an important sense, even with Jo Martin.
Regarding the truism, that’s an interesting fact-check, but I do feel there’s a qualitative difference. I did say “mainstream media”, and I didn’t just mean “aired on TV”, both in that I meant “in media that are not primarily selling themselves as being About Queer People” and that I wasn’t just thinking of television. I worry that I’m no-true-scotsmanning here but if you’ll bear with me, it does seem to me that “major female protagonists of media not primarily advertised as LGBTQ Narratives(TM) are more likely to be incidentally gay or bi than their male counterparts”. Thinking on it more, protagonist status also matters here; a number of shows might have a secondary character who’s gay, but that’s not what I’m talking about, I do mean leads, and leads in populist stuff.
In short it just seems obviously true to me that in a series like Who, a gay romance between a male Doctor and companion would/will be more surprising and incendiary than a sapphic one. (I would likewise guess there are more textually-queer female superheroes than male ones in the big hitters’ stables, etc.) And one cannot help but suspect that this has something to do with a certain tendency on make sexists’ part to fetishise lesbians but feel that male homosexuality is emasculating. Whether all of this matters in the grand scheme of things, I wouldn’t want to say — the interesting stuff is indubitably happening far from media that are populist enough to be influenced by such things — but if we’re talking about what 21st century Doctor Who is doing, that’s the field it’s playing in.
February 26, 2024 @ 7:33 pm
Regarding your comment on superheroes… Yes and no. All in all, I think the ratio is fairly even — it’s just that non-straight female superheroes are usually bigger names. You know, like Wonder Woman, Harley & Ivy, Catwoman, Mystique, Batwoman… Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure the highest-profile non-straight male superhero is Loki, who’s traditionally a villain, followed by Constantine and… I guess Deadpool? Maybe?
(cue debate whether Constantine is actually a superhero, to which I say “while the definition of ‘superhero’ is fairly nebulous, I think that someone who was a main character on an Arrowverse show for three seasons more than qualifies, whether you like it or not”).
February 26, 2024 @ 10:54 pm
I honestly think “lesbian content only happens more because of Men” wouldn’t stand up that much to a case-by-case inspection as people assume. It probably has some systemic impact, but I’m also not aware of any women heading up Torchwood, Sherlock or Supernatural.
February 27, 2024 @ 10:01 am
tbh i focused on television because i felt maybe it has a bigger chance of being true there; when it comes to literature, i’m mostly familiar with discussions going on in romance and sffh, where there’s a noticeable skewing towards gay stories rather than lesbian ones (and then there’s the whole BL/yaoi/danmei phenomenon…)
February 27, 2024 @ 11:23 am
I suspect that perhaps even more important than straight men’s fetishes, women are just in general considered “less important” by society (I mean all over but in media particularly), and thus a woman having a same-sex relationship in the media doesn’t attract as much attention – NOTHING a woman does attracts as much attention a man doing the same thing.
Now that I think of it, you know what doesn’t happen in this era as far as I can remember? The story where the bad guys ignore the Doctor because they assume a “mere woman” is of no importance, giving her the freedom to bring down the system unnoticed. Heck, that’s a classic Doctor Who story structure if you swap “woman” for “buffoon”
February 27, 2024 @ 12:51 pm
Very true…
February 26, 2024 @ 6:08 am
It would be remiss if nobody in the Eruditosphere comment circuit brought up the curiosity of Joy Wilkinson’s Witchfinders novelisation going all out on Hell Bent / Clara and Ashildr nostalgia, of all things (so I might as well get in there first). If nothing else, it’s an odd but fascinating little wrinkle that proves that one of the guest writers, at least, seems to have watched and engaged with the Capaldi era.
Context – the book gives Willa Twiston (the young girl with the pagan-adjacent herbal healer grandmother, for those who have deleted most Chibnall era one-off character names) a fair bit more material, all quite sympathetic stuff, and at the very end she goes on to become a travelling healer-Doctor, as she says she will in the episode. This means she ends up on trial for being a witch some thirty years later, and in her jail cell she writes to the Doctor and co. begging them for help. Somehow they receive this letter, the Doctor consults her sonic’s readings of Willa and finds out that because her grandmother had been feeding her herbal remedies etc using the bark of the Morax tree she has some sort of magically enhanced blood, something “ancient and eternal”. In a rather on-the-nose bit of “fucked up Chibnall era morality”, the fact of her having special magic blood is enough for the Doctor to agree to altering time and saving her from the witch trial.
Then it gets really interesting: after being rescued, the older Willa ends up joining Clara and Ashildr/Me “somewhere where the tree came from that isn’t a tree. A whole not-forest strung with not-fairy-lights”, a place at the end of the universe where the three of them, “three girls from the North”, become some sort of variation of the Three Norns or the Greek Fates, “holding the threads that weave the universe together”. Because she looks older than either of the other two, they call her “Mother”. The last detail is that they are “warming themselves by the light of the threads, which are golden like [Mother Twiston’s] hair. Like hope.”
On the one hand, there is something snigger-worthily bathetic about Wilkinson elevating her OC to such a mythical status both within the fiction and in terms of positioning her alongside two superb, iconic characters from what one could certainly argue is the best season of the modern era (while also gatecrashing their runaway romance). And if you read the other two calling her “Mother” as deferential that’s gotta sting (though personally I think it’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek). And lastly I don’t know if my personal headcanon of Clara/Me is that they do anything quite as static as becoming the weavers of stories rather than having stories of their own. But at the same time … it’s kinda hard not to be charmed by a corner of the Whittaker years clinging to a weird bit of pagan mythology while also remembering S9 exists and wanting to engage with it and respect two of its greatest characters, as well as recognising the slightly Norse sub-flavour that season has got going on.
February 26, 2024 @ 8:40 am
I remember being very confused by the ending of this – the episode feels like it’s setting up ‘they’ve gone into the wind and the earth and the rain,’ as the final line, then it ends on a lame ‘where did the TARDIS go’ beat instead.
That said, I liked the line about Tarantino. Quite a clever gag, that.
February 26, 2024 @ 2:13 pm
My primary memory of this episode is tensing up when the Doctor and fam came across the impending accused-witch drowning and angrily thinking to myself, if the Doctor doesn’t fucking intervene and just watches it happen, I am DONE, I am switching this off and won’t be watching any more Chibnall episodes. And, given the season we’d gotten so far, it seemed like pretty reasonable odds that that might happen. When it didn’t, I relaxed and ended up enjoying the episode, my expectations low enough by this point that “not a moral disaster” was the only bar it needed to clear, apparently.
Re: the Doctor encountering sexism and this being the only time – I think the worst part of this is the fact that it was in a historical episode. Not only is this extremely low-hanging fruit, but the lack of any exploration of sexism in the modern day or in future-based stories that could be an analog for current day society tacitly implies that sexism WAS a problem in the past, but ISN’T today. There are in theory tons of genuinely interesting ways for the Doctor to interact with sexism as a woman, either as the main focus of a story or in small asides, but none of it occurred to anybody involved. (Hell, it took a fan-art comic just to make the obvious joke about the Doctor finding women’s clothing with pockets.)
February 26, 2024 @ 4:12 pm
The EU seems to have handled this a bit better. Juno Dawson has that novel where a civilisation thinks Graham is the Doctor and venerates an idol of him for however many years, instead of her, for basically sexist reasons. I think there’s an Eruditorum post coming up on it toward the end of the S11 run.
Not to do with sexism, but a Jenny Colgan short story (kinda surprisingly) has Yaz and the Doctor discuss periods. Yaz seeks the Doctor out because “it’s my time of the month” and she’s feeling rotten so the Doctor takes her to a nice bathroom in the TARDIS, gives her chocolate and a hot water bottle, and tells her a story about celebrity historically encountering Amelia Earhart to take her mind off things. It’s all quite earnestly meant – she’s one of the sisterhood now so she’s better at understanding this kind of thing (specifically: “it’s easier looking like a girl”, but nb. not actually ‘being’ one) – but there are the slight TERFy alarm bells ringing in there of the Doctor referring to past women she’s travelled with as “human females”. I don’t think this was meant as a dogwhistle, from what I gather of Colgan, so much as ‘quirky but unfortunate Doctor phrasing’, but yeah. It’s a bit gender essentialist at best, even if it’s trying a lot harder than the show (and maybe going further than the show realistically could, idk).
February 26, 2024 @ 5:49 pm
I’ve had the same reaction to that witch drowning scene. What a glorious fucking era of DW: we’re elated that the Doctor bothered to try (and fail) to save someone.
February 26, 2024 @ 4:31 pm
On Whittaker being on board with what Chibnall was doing… the thing is, surely RTD and Moffat must have been as well? They kept using him. I’ve heard people say “maybe he got his scripts in to spec and on time”, but for two of arguably the best showrunners in British TV of the last few decades, is that enough? Was the initial script to The Hungry Earth of such high quality that Moffat thought “I HAVE to use this guy again!”? Was Cyberwoman so amazing that Davies believed that he’d been absolutely correct in getting Chibs to run his spin-off?
February 26, 2024 @ 6:53 pm
Tbf the original drafts for ‘Hungry Earth/Cold Blood’ do sound pretty lit, actually. The whole second half was going to be done Memento-style through Amy’s subjectively unfolding memories of the adventure, getting more and more broken up and fragmented and ragged as we get closer to Rory dying / the denouement. And there were great big armoured dinosaur monsters the Silurians had as guard dogs. All cut for budget and hasty edit reasons and they cobble together that patchy narration by the Silurian Elder to try and give the story weight.
February 26, 2024 @ 11:04 pm
“Writing an average script that’s easy enough to touch up” isn’t objectionable at all to someone in the showrunner’s position; they kept using multiple “meh” writers because they really were good enough for that production process. Chibnall as showrunner is a completely different job with different responsibilities for one to be on board or not with. As for Torchwood, none of the writers were really sure what to do with that show except Davies who didn’t stick around, so Chibnall’s not really the problem there.
February 26, 2024 @ 5:47 pm
I’ve always found the “good Doctor bogged down by bad scripts” defence as applied to Whittaker simply baffling, for reasons this essay articulates better than I ever could. I struggle to think of any scenes where her Doctor has the kind of magnetic screen presence that Capaldi or Tom Baker had. At her best, she gives off “Tennant lite” vibes, just without Tennant’s charisma or depth of performance.
February 27, 2024 @ 4:00 am
“Good Doctor bogged down by bad scripts” is, at the end of the day, an eminently testable hypothesis. It was said of Colin Baker, and lo and behold once people wrote him some decent audios a critical reappraisal was well underway. It is currently said of Jodie, but the hypothesis has arguably not really been tested to any significant extent yet. (I’m willing to go to bat for It Takes You Away and Demons of the Punjab as being actually good stories, but the Doctor is only particularly significant in one of those and therefore it’s wholly possible to write off as an outlier.)
The thing is… OK, so with Davison you had some genuinely good stories slip through the cracks during his TV era. And with Colin Baker, it was self-evident by the end of the era (in part because of Eric Saward spilling the beans to Starburst) that he was the victim of creative strife behind the scenes, in the kindest version of the story. (And in the unkindest version, he was outright sabotaged by a script editor who never wanted to give him a chance.)
Colin is, to my mind, an exceptionally good actor for allowing a glimpse of a better version of his Doctor to emerge in brief flashes during television stories largely designed to undermine him, and it was those flashes people used as a basis for later stories. Many of his best audios (at least of those I have heard, and I admit I’ve only heard the early ones up to The Holy Terror or thereabouts) seem to be built on the idea of “OK, what if we let Colin do more of That Thing or This Bit, in a story which better supported it?”, and to his credit he grabbed those opportunities with both hands and wholly exonerated himself.
I’m much less sure what anyone could use as the kernel of a Thirteenth Doctor Story Only Good This Time. The bit at the end of It Takes You Away where she manages a bit of conversational manoeuvring to get the humans to reject/be rejected by the Solitract, in order to propel them out of the mirror world to safety, perhaps, but that’s literally one moment in three seasons and a cluster of specials.
I really don’t think she has any other truly great moments in her run which make you sit up and think “Yes, this is what the Doctor is supposed to be about”, particularly once you get to entire seasons based around her getting upstaged by Jo Martin or blithely watching the Master do a Powerpoint presentation in the Matrix and then assuming it’s true, after the Master has demonstrated that the Matrix can lie in literally every preceding story involving the Master interacting with the Matrix. Sure, it’s not Whittaker’s fault, but it still means that there’s precious little material to build on there.
Honestly, the absolute best thing she did as the Doctor was that video message she improv’d at home at the start of the COVID lockdowns, but whilst that was nice and heartwarming and a lovely gesture, it’s not a foundation you can build a full-size story on, any more than you can infer World Enough and Time or Heaven Sent from that video message Capaldi did in-character to the autistic kid who was struggling with grieving a grandparent.
February 27, 2024 @ 1:16 pm
“Honestly, the absolute best thing she did as the Doctor was that video message she improv’d at home at the start of the COVID lockdowns. ”
This is so true. I wish it wasn’t true, but it is. If she improvised it, it shows a grasp of the character that she rarely, if ever, got to portray in “proper” episodes. And it almost physically hurts me to say that.
February 27, 2024 @ 1:17 pm
That was scripted by Chibnall.
February 27, 2024 @ 7:36 pm
Really? Pfffffft where was that writing in the actual episodes?????
February 29, 2024 @ 1:07 pm
Thanks for the factual clarification.
Hypotheses: Chibnall writes better sketches than episodes. Chibnall writes the Doctor better with kids in mind. There was something in covid that made him rise to the occasion.
Dunno if there is any evidence or counter evidence for any of the above. Come to think of it, can you think of any of his material that was written with kids in mind?
July 22, 2024 @ 11:32 am
Definitely? There were two, weren’t there? The Cupboard one, and ‘United We Stand 2m Apart’ which feels much more, ah… Chibby.
February 27, 2024 @ 9:58 am
Read this article earlier and thought it was weird Mandip Gill hasn’t been in much since she left Doctor Who, but now it’s been announced that she’s starring in a new show called Curfew, set in a world where all men are forced to wear ankle tags to stay off the streets every night. (Not sure if this applies to trans men.)
February 28, 2024 @ 12:40 am
you can bet it applies to trans women though
February 27, 2024 @ 11:34 am
I’m not sure this acting critique is entirely fair to Whittaker. Let’s first situate what “salvaging a scene” can amount to: when Tom can be bothered to do it, he’s by far the best Who performer at managing that task. He was also egotistical and abusive, insisting he owned the part, and those characteristics partly explain why he made performance choices that turned poor scripts entertaining. Those are also characteristics shaped powerfully by gender. It is quite possible that Whittaker lacks the acting skills to manage a “salvaging” when one was needed, but I’d argue that she never makes that choice to begin with.
Whittaker, far more than any other performer of the Doctor, owed her job to Chibnall. They’d worked together before, he opted to cast a woman, and he picked her. I’d identify her greatest fault not in her limited ability to perform, but in her deference to Chibnall. She clearly wants to perform the character as he envisions it (and I’m unsure his vision is very clear), and that, coupled with the shortness of her tenure in the role, means that she never quite puts her own stamp on the part. She’s trying to play Chibnall’s version of the Doctor, not Whittaker’s version of the Doctor. Given that Chibnall told her not to research the role, he actively wanted her to do that.
I also think the fundamental flaws with the Chibnall era aren’t ones an actor can salvage. He cast the first woman in the role; he doesn’t actually seem interested in exploring issues related to gender in the show itself. And only 7 out of her 31 stories don’t have Chibnall’s name on them as writer or co-writer: Demons of the Punjab, Kerblam!, The Witchfinders, It Takes You Away, Orphan 55, Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terrors, and The Haunting of Villa Diodati. I doubt even Capaldi could salvage Orphan 55; the others feature most of her best performances.
Is she able to out-act Alan Cummings? No. Plenty of actors can’t. I think it matters that Alan Cummings is another actor with a reputation of being “willful” and sometimes difficult to work with. He would never accept a part without planning to own it.
I’d say Whittaker’s greatest acting strengths on display as Thirteen are being able to nail the “sense of wonder” while staring at a green screen, and emotional connections with people. She gets lots of ignorable opportunities at the first; Chibnall’s writing constantly denies and undercuts the second. That she plays the part as Chibnall wants her to, pretty much, doesn’t make her a bad actor, it just doesn’t work for this role.
Arguably, she does a fantastic job portraying the character as Chibnall imagines her. That’s the poor acting choice she makes.
February 27, 2024 @ 11:36 am
*Cumming, not Cummings.
February 28, 2024 @ 4:10 am
I think this is a good angle on it. I also think we get to see less versions of her Doctor than Tennant, Smith or Capaldi. Even with Russell T and Stephen Moffat’s close involvement with scripts and wholesale rewriting, there was at least a writer or two whose own style came through. Gatiss, to the extent we can identify whole different phases of his engagement with Who scriptwriting. Moffat under Davies, Chibnall…Toby Whithouse? Gareth Roberts, alas? Which means we get see slightly different takes on the Doctor, quite apart from the fact that Davies and Moffat also like to place the character under stress to show unexpected reactions and different facets.
It doesn’t feel to me like any of the individual writers under Chibnall were ever allowed to make much of their own mark. We don’t really see Malorie Blackman’s Doctor or Vinay Patel’s Doctor. No one is allowed to escape the not-a-style house style.
And all this leaves me wondering…what exactly Chibnall was such a fan of? He’s such a big fan of the show he was criticising it on TV when he was 16. But put in charge of it, there’s no vision he’s eager to make real, no “this is how Trial of a Time Lord should have been done”, not even just playing the greatest hits of the past. Just nothingness.
His most radical idea isn’t The Timeless Child, but his first series where he has no monsters or characters from the past. But he puts nothing in their place. Which ironically centres them: the Daleks and Cybermen and Master and Mentors and Voord are so important that them not showing up is the most radical thing he can imagine for Doctor Who.
July 22, 2024 @ 11:12 am
Aye, while I think there are many complicating factors and Jodie is not in herself a weak actor in the sense of being able to play parts well with good direction, but then discretion is part of what’s being assessed here, not just raw capability in a void, but ability and willing to discern what needs doing and to do it on that basis, not just because you’ve been told to.
At the end of the day what we have here is an era DOA, and all we can do for it and for ourselves is the grim task of autopsy. I’m sure everyone involved meant well and tried by the standards of what they could do at he time (with some room for low key sabotage by factions within the BBC who might be happy to see the show go into decline for their own ideological reasons), but the question is not whether Jodie is trying or whether she could have been better served, it is simply whether, as it stands, she is part of the problem. And the fact remains that she is.
February 28, 2024 @ 10:56 am
“coupled with the shortness of her tenure in the role”
She had five years or so (Christmas 2017-Autumn 2022) so was longer in the role than Matt did (Christmas 2009-Christmas 2013)
February 28, 2024 @ 11:33 am
But with significantly fewer minutes of screen time, no? Two and a half series, three new year episodes and two additional specials. It’s substantially less of an opportunity to put your mark on the role.
February 28, 2024 @ 12:20 pm
Tom Baker, Chris and David (for example) put “their mark” on the role in their very first seek and built upon it. By the time of Power Of The Doctor, Jodie had been the Dr for five years or so, yet she still seemed the newbie.
February 27, 2024 @ 3:58 pm
To Tosin Cole’s credit, once he gets given some material that’s worth getting out of bed for, he absolutely. brings it: I’m thinking particularly about Can You Hear Me, but also his scenes in Revolution of the Daleks where he decides he’s done with the Doctor and wants to bow out.
“Eccleston got it with Simon Callow, Tennant with Pauline Collins and Anthony Head, Smith with Ian McNeice and Iain Glen, and Coleman with Peter Capaldi.”
That might be a better line than most of those in this era of the show.
February 29, 2024 @ 9:59 pm
I enjoyed this one, for reasons that were approximately 80% Alan Cumming and 20% lowered expectations. (How quickly I adjusted to the Chibnall era.) But I’m still amazed that the episode about witch-hunts somehow ended with the Doctor in a witchfinder-general hat leading a mob with torches as they chase creatures possessed by an evil alien force.
March 3, 2024 @ 2:14 am
I have read a couple of these reviews. As far as I am concerned they are just an exercise in masochism. You hate this era of program for both it’s lack of ideas or the ham fisted-ness of those ideas. That is perfectly valid stance to have on the program but there also comes a point you have to know when to walk away and write about something that actually makes you happy.
March 3, 2024 @ 2:20 am
I approached these at a rate of one a month to prevent burnout. But ultimately Eruditorum is the site’s most popular feature, and a girl’s gotta eat, so I write it.