Some Rather Gruesome Habits (Demons of the Punjab)
It’s November 11th, 2018. Ariana grande has debuted at number one with “Thank U, Next,” while Rita Ora, Calvin Harris & Sam Smith, and Halsey also chart. In news, midterm elections lead the Democrats to take control of the House of Representatives, but not the Senate. Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigns, which is really to say he’s fired because Trump doesn’t appreciate his failure to protect him from legal probes. The Camp Fire begins in California, eventually becoming the most deadly and destructive fire in the state. And Jo Johnson resigns from the cabinet and calls for a new Brexit referendum, a move that surely makes him popular with his older brother Boris.
While on television, an overtly political story in Demons of the Punjab. Of course, the question of the Chibnall era’s politics is a complex one. As the last three posts ought make clear, the “Chibnall is woke” argument is at best a desperate oversimplification. As the next one will make clear, at worst it’s an egregious misreading. And yet it is true that the Chibnall era regularly engages in a sort of earnest “look at all the diversity we’re putting in” approach to the series. And more to the point, when it does this it tends to take the job seriously—there’s a tangible uptick in quality—a certain “this actually went through a second draft” crackle that is absent in, say, its season finales. All of which is to say that Demons of the Punjab is almost completely unique in the Chibnall era, in that it is a perfectly good episode of Doctor Who. Were I in a good mood about Doctor Who, this would probably be an upbeat, relatively happy entry. You could reasonably expect that of me. What follows is, in fact, slightly unfair. But this is the Chibnall era, and even its best leaves a bitter taste. So allow me to present the case for the prosecution. Because at the end of the day, Demons of the Punjab explains more about the era’s most fundamental weaknesses than it does about its strengths by dint of removing all the unforced errors so that the more fundamental misconceptions can stand alone.
Broadly speaking, this is an episode of Doctor Who that should have existed before 2022. It is actively embarrassing that Doctor Who has taken this long to go to the Indian subcontinent, just as it is actively embarrassing that Yaz is the first Desi companion. An episode that deals with the horrors inflicted by the British Empire in real and honest terms, where the words “British Empire” and “India” are used instead of “Earth Empire” and “Solos,” is massively overdue.
But of course, Demons of the Punjab doesn’t use the words “British Empire.” Or any other kind of empire. It’s not quite a complete amnesia—we hear a radio announcement that specifies the Partition as being done by Lord Mountbatten, Umbreen talks about “men without a clue,” albeit without explicitly mentioning who they are. Most significantly, Prem gets a line to the Doctor about how “maybe you’re my enemy now, for the mess you’ve just made of my country. Carving it up slapdash, in six weeks” that comes after explicitly identifying her as British. (More puzzlingly, he also suggests at one point that they keep it to themselves that they’re from England, which feels like a big ask for the white people with English accents.) This isn’t going as far as trying to pretend that it’s not British imperialism that is ultimately responsible for all the tragedy we see here, but it’s also very much not about that imperialism either. It’s a story about an imperialist horror that treats it much like any other historical horror, not too differently from how one might treat a flood or a volcano.
Is this defensible? I mean, you probably want to read a non-white writer on Doctor Who for definitive hot takes like that. It’s certainly unusual—read other genre fiction about racial trauma and the question of culpability and responsibility is foregrounded in ways that it simply isn’t here. That’s not to say that these works are about the question of blame—simply that a trauma that is inflicted by other people, for their profit, on racial grounds is substantively different than one inflicted by an ornery tectonic plate.
Where this becomes troubled within Demons of the Punjab is in the handling of Manish. There’s much to like here, most obviously the degree to which his destructive Hindu nationalism is set up to read easily as a critique of Narendra Modi’s politics. But the absence of any real presence of, you know, the British Empire there becomes no real sense of how Manish was radicalized to the point of killing his own brother beyond the deliberately vague and present-day paralleling “pamphlets and angry men on the radio.” With no discussion of larger structures or, really, of any British malfeasance beyond “carving it up slapdash, in six weeks” (and note, looking back at that line, the explicit “you’re my enemy now,” with its tacit erasure of any mess made of the country prior to Partition) Manish comes perilously close to being a character who serves to position all the blame for the violence and radicalization on the colonized. One gets the vague impression that the problem with Partition was that in Britain’s carelessness it overlooked how violent the people of India were.
I’d accuse this of all being frustratingly reactionary, except that the reactionary position on colonial horrors is to outright ignore them, hence the fashy dipshits who complain about this episode being woke propaganda or whatever. The vacuousness involved here—it is important to acknowledge that Partition was bad, but nothing actually follows from that fact aside from the emotive response—is more accurately diagnosed as a centrist liberal position on colonial horrors. Which is the same frustration we’ve had with Doctor Who since roughly 100,000 BC, so there’s not a huge amount of point in suddenly deciding that it’s a dealbreaker. But never has the radical potential been so prominently right there, so obviously a thing this specific story and concept wants to be used for, and yet so conspicuously, loudly avoided. (This is not a record Demons of the Punjab will hold for very long at all, but we’ll get there soon enough.)
In many ways, it is productive to compare this to Kinda. We noted back in Arachnids in the UK that Chibnall’s underlying model for Doctor Who appears to be the Davison era. And here we have perhaps the most idiosyncratically specific parallel: one of the rare highlights of both eras is a first season episode that is about imperialism, but not in an especially satisfying way. Like Demons of the Punjab, Kinda opposes colonialism while granting key premises. Demons of the Punjab does better than Kinda’s fundamentally ghastly “but the primitives are enlightened,” not least by not having any characters that could be described as “primitives,” but the two stories are clearly of a type. More to the point, however, they both feature a conspicuously inactive Doctor. Admittedly Davison’s Doctor at least gets to come up with the idea of using mirrors to contain the rubber snake, whereas Whittaker’s Doctor is left with literally nothing to do within the story when the passive Doctor model of the Davison era finds itself juxtaposed with the “the monsters aren’t really monsters” trope to leave the Doctor in a position where all she really does in the story is figure out the plot and explain it to the audience.
It’s commonly observed that this would have worked very well as a pure historical. And there’s a real merit to this—when that argument is made elsewhere there’s usually a failure to appreciate exactly what a Doctor Who story is doing. The Fires of Pompeii, for instance, certainly could have worked as a pure historical—Steve Lyons basically did it—except that part of the narrative function of The Fires of Pompeii is that it has a giant lava monster for the kids. Demons of the Punjab, however, is one of the most adult-oriented Doctor Who episodes of the new series—certainly the most adult-oriented episode of the Chibnall era. The Thijarians are clearly not here to to appeal to the kids. Indeed, they come perilously close to simply existing to make sure this story has aliens. Their only contribution to the plot is to introduce a cheap “fixed point” explanation for why Prem has to die and to reveal that Manish killed the holy man; the former is unnecessary, the latter could easily have been attained through other means. Except that were they not here the Doctor would have literally nothing whatsoever to do.
Which is, I would argue, where the “passive Doctor” approach shows its limits. I mean, above and beyond the fact that it keeps not working, we can see here the extent to which it’s fundamentally flawed and unworkable. Because when you put a Doctor who is conceived as a relatively passive element of a story instead of as a moral center in a story about a historical trauma with moral dimensions there’s fundamentally nothing for her to do. Indeed, this isn’t just true of historical traumas. The passive Doctor means that the Doctor becomes a tricky figure to use in stories with any sort of clear-cut moral stakes.
Kinda handles this by concocting a story where the only thing that straightforwardly needs moral condemnation is a giant snake monster, and even that’s just a manifestation of everyone’s inner darkness. But that’s not true of Demons of the Punjab. Perhaps this is partially a matter of structure; Kinda had four episodes to build its world, and so is able to sketch something that has room to hold ambivalences. And, again, we shouldn’t pretend that Kinda’s racial politics are anything to aspire to in 2022. Or, frankly, that they were in 1982. But Demons of the Punjab, with fifty minutes, barely has time to paint a family in anything more than caricatures. And so its ambivalences aren’t artfully constructed gaps in the larger whole; they are the larger whole. I remain one who isn’t inclined to criticize the pacing or structure of the new series, but the simple fact of the matter is that modern Doctor Who is a lot better suited to moral clarity than it is to poignant ambivalences.
And this, perhaps is the key thing to remember. There are other ways to handle Partition than this. No, of course we can’t reasonably expect the Doctor to bring down the British Empire, and 1947 would be a strange year to do it anyway. But there’s a wide gulf between “bring down the British Empire” and “leave all moral points in subtext,” and there were places on that spectrum this story could have occupied if it wanted to. But it doesn’t. Instead it seems like all it really wants to say is “the Partition happened, and it was bad,” all very much in the passive tense.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with bearing witness as an aesthetic goal. One can very easily imagine a drama about Partition that does a powerful and compelling job of depicting its horrors by simply bearing witness to lives and how they’re torn apart. The problem is that such a drama is a piece of social realism, not a piece of action-adventure sci-fi whose normal emotional mode is melodrama. And it’s not entirely clear why this particular story is being done in an action-adventure sci-fi show.
Is that a problem? I mean, the whole point of Doctor Who is that you can do anything with it. This is, obviously, included in “anything,” and it should have been included a lot earlier than it was. But the result doesn’t manage to exploit the potential of Doctor Who or of the premise. As with Rosa, it feels like its primary goal is to be able to say that Doctor Who has done a story about Partition. It’s not trying to be interesting, or bold, or ambitious—its only apparent aesthetic goal is being Important.
And look, fine. This story tackles a topic that would be easy to do badly and doesn’t fuck it up. It holds together as fifty perfectly watchable minutes of television that actually possess aboutness. It no doubt meant that a significant number of kids who would not otherwise have known a thing about what their country did to India will now have at least a vague, hazy idea that Britain did some fucked up shit. To be quite honest, it’s genuinely hard to write a bad review of this and not be a fucking fascist. You can ask for more. I’d argue that you probably should ask for more. But you’re not gonna get it from the Chibnall era. In context, this is a triumph, but let’s not forget how much work “in context” is doing there. It can have the gold star it so obviously wants. Just don’t expect me to enjoy giving it.
February 12, 2024 @ 6:28 am
Perhaps the best story of the era. It’s a shame that it looks like an accident and it wouldn’t be repeated (and a year later, Nora Inayat-Khan, who should have had a story to herself, is just a sub plot in a Master romp)
February 12, 2024 @ 6:38 am
That’s the most aggravating thing – that in the middle of S11, there is this really quite strong model for historical stories going forward, namely, to avoid focusing on the trappings of celebrity historicals and Main Characters of History and to instead linger on the forgotten casualties of major events… and then the rest of the era doesn’t follow up on it at all, and instead doubles down on Famous People with Ada Lovelace, Noor Inayat Khan, Tesla, Edison, the Shelleys, Byron and Polidori, Mary Seacole, and Madame Ching (only ‘Village of the Angels’ after this point is a non-celeb historical, though it’s more of a genre piece than about any real events anyway). I don’t think the story was an accident, in that I think Vinay Patel was very conscious of what he was doing here and why, but clearly the rest of the team didn’t learn from it in any way.
Typically, in this respect S11 is building off the good foundations laid down in S10, where (after a few years of Celebrity Mythological stories, e.g. Robin Hood) both ‘Thin Ice’ and ‘The Eaters of Light’ also dwell on real events but make sure that their focus is on forgotten or lost underdogs who are the victims of oppression.
February 12, 2024 @ 6:55 am
We also end up getting into the Wikipedia Whittaker era, where Jodie’s Doctor reacts to meeting famous people by gabbling a Wikipedia summary of their biography, because apparently it is impossible for a storyteller to explain a historical character in any other way, just not possible at all, it’s the scriptwriting equivalent of calculating the square root of minus one. (/sarcasm)
February 12, 2024 @ 6:53 am
For me this episode is the high water mark of the era – not because any of your criticisms are incorrect, they’re all accurate to my eyes, but simply because this is the last time the Chibnall era actually attempted something like this – the last time we get the show selecting a particular historical setting outside of the narrow assumed experience of middle-class England and telling a serious story in which the political context of the place in question is significant*.
You’re right that this is the sort of thing that social realist prestige drama does better than SF genre TV, but equally prestige drama seems to be where Chibnall actually wants to be a lot of the time, at least in season 11 and in flickering brief moments of season 12. But to me, this and Rosa feel like the sole times when the era’s dedication to diversity feels like it’s trying to do something a bit deeper than just a performative box-ticking exercise.
I despise describing it in those terms, which sound incredibly reactionary, but equally Chibnall too frequently engages in a reactionary’s idea of what diverse representation is without actually showing much understanding of why that representation is important in the first place, or how it demands to be tackled. A person that truly ideologically cared about a racially diverse slate of companions would not give all the personality to Graham and leave only scraps for Ryan and Yaz; a person that was passionately dedicated to disability representation would not constantly forget about Ryan’s dyspraxia; a person who truly recognised the importance of getting Jodie’s run right wouldn’t have half-assed her era of the show. Chibnall strikes me as the sort of person who understands that the reactionaries are the baddies, but has a worldview shockingly similar to theirs, which is why he’s able to do a version of the show which seems shockingly “woke” to them and desperately regressive to us.
In other words, as you say, he’s a centrist.
For that matter it’s perilously close to the last time we get “fifty perfectly watchable minutes of television that actually possess aboutness”, though I will always go to bat for It Takes You Away, largely for being a high water mark for Jodie’s Doctor and her moment of least passivity.
February 12, 2024 @ 7:05 am
Having this as the remembrance day episode, and actually pulling it off, is one of the few moments where the era seems to really try to explore the question of what C21st Doctor Who c/should be doing – what it could be for and how it might intervene in a particular contemporary moments. It’s a real shame that it doesn’t recognise that and take it somewhere (and the next episode fluffs it completely)
But as an engagement with remembrance day, this works much better, I think, than Moffatt’s attempt with Death in Heaven (which aired Sat 8th Nov), in which the series-long soldier stuff ends up being too on the nose – but somehow also still muddled.
February 12, 2024 @ 7:21 am
Yeah, I was saying this elsewhere – that the context of this episode’s broadcast is incredibly important, much as the exact season/date/time of broadcast was emphasised in entries on ‘Kill the Moon’ and ‘Death in Heaven’. It airs on a poppy-mad nation’s Remembrance Sunday, precisely 100 years to the day after the WW1 Armistice, directly screening after the pomp and pageantry of the Queen at Westminster Abbey, and using that as a way to meditate on paying witness and tribute and remembrance not just to the soldiers of various ethnicities who fought for Britain in WW2 but also the forgotten casualties of Britain’s own actions…
There are even carefully lingering shots of poppies in the Spanish fields pretending to be the Punjabi countryside – they knew what they were doing and saying. “If you want to do Remembrance, for God’s sake, it should be THIS.”
February 12, 2024 @ 12:12 pm
I think you (or someone) said something like this in the comments on Patreon when this first went up, but as that’s an entire Patreon ago pulling it up and looking at the feedback to see if I wanted to make a revision was more than I was up for before posting this last night.
But yes, good point once agai.
February 12, 2024 @ 5:28 pm
Yeah, that was me way back, because I repeat my points ad infinitum cycling round from one year to the next 😆
Thanks though!
February 12, 2024 @ 7:23 am
The Thijarians are the audience identification characters, of course. They tell us what we’re doing.
February 12, 2024 @ 7:53 am
Isn’t that just what the Doctor is doing?
February 12, 2024 @ 6:46 pm
The Thijarians are the British. They are the BBC. They were terrible imperialists but now they make a point of “commemorating” and remembering the victims (i.e. making Doctor Who episodes about them).
February 13, 2024 @ 8:26 am
They’re arguably an imperfect analogue because the Thijarians in the story are presented not just as reformed violent assassins, but also as having suffered the massively traumatic loss of their homeworld and their “ancestors”. The destruction of not only one’s home but also one’s culture and history is much more akin to the experience of the colonised than of any colonisers.
That said, it’s probably true to say that Britain is (still) in the grips of a sort of post-imperial ‘trauma’ (very much in scare quotes because it’s nothing compared to the multiple real traumas it inflicted) arising from the loss of its Empire and a sort of existential malaise about its place in the world that has haunted it ever since. So it’s not an impossible read by any means!
February 13, 2024 @ 9:14 am
One might quite unpleasantly consider how often you see privileged people perceiving the loss of the tiniest bit of their privilege as “They’ve taken away our country, destroyed our way of life.” I don’t think Chibnall is anywhere near far enough down the rabbit hole to actively imagine that Britain’s comparative loss of status is really equivalent to the literal destruction of a homeland and loss of cultural history. But he might be enough of a hack to parrot those tropes back without thinking them through.
February 13, 2024 @ 10:06 am
You mean the British establishment? The ironic thing about their empire, is that the life of ordinary people in Britain improved as the empire declined. In the 19th Century (Britain’s “Imperial Century” no less) most hadn’t the vote, men, women and children risked life and limb slaving in the coal fields of in factories (while their employers bought up land throughout the country and kicked the people living there out) and faced prison or transportation of they got involved with a union or had the army attack them if they protested. And let’s not forget about the “famine” in Ireland.
February 12, 2024 @ 9:41 am
I’m not sure I agree this could have been a pure historical; if this is a drama all about bearing witness to history, the aliens whose purpose in life is to bear witness seem pretty important thematically, if not in plot terms.
(I’m also dubious about ‘pure historical’ as a term, but that’s another comment).
February 13, 2024 @ 1:56 pm
As I was thinking back about this episode, I couldn’t help but think that there could be a really interesting story of conflict between the Doctor and the Thijarians. The Doctor and friends would be in the middle of a crazy, messy sci-fi war trying to save people, but the Thijarians keep interfering so that they can witness the deaths of everyone the Doctor is trying to rescue.
It would give more context to the idea of fixed points in time that crop up through the series since 2005 too. I’ve talked about this in past Eruditora, but El’s misery creating this provokes me to think of it again. The Doctor can’t interfere in a lot of Earth’s history, but does all kinds of stuff in the history of other worlds. So maybe the difference is that the Doctor is so deeply integrated in Earth’s history, and their companions are usually from Earth, so the Doctor can’t mess with historical conditions that resulted in the birth of their friends. Barbara can’t save Aztec civilization because the Spanish conquest is a major event in her world’s history. Rose can’t save her dad because it won’t fit with the entire way she’s lived since she was a baby. Yaz can’t save her grandmother’s first husband because she won’t be born if her grandmother doesn’t remarry. It’s involvement, knowledge, and witness that fixes a point in time – so it’s only fixed for you. But cosmic witnesses like the Thijarians can fix all of time in place. And maybe that’s their goal.
So here’s this planet where the Doctor is trying to do their Doctor thing, stop a war, save a bunch of people, save the whole planet mostly, and the Thijarians keep getting in her way, letting the war continue, and letting people die, because they consider their witnessing more important than actually doing good. Eventually, the Doctor just snaps.
February 17, 2024 @ 11:19 am
I like your idea very much, but now I’m trying to imagine Jodie’s Doctor “just snapping” and I just can’t do it. I feel like her “snapping” would amount to pushing over a garbage bin and then sulking in the TARDIS for a few days.
February 12, 2024 @ 9:49 am
The twist on “Kinda” is that the primitives are not primitives. That they in fact have advanced understanding of DNA, and that they have artificially bioengineered their planet to be the kind of planet they can live on lightly.
Far from being imperialist gobbledygook, this is in fact a remarkably accurate metaphor for the real-life victims of colonization. The North American woods and plains, the Amazon jungles, the SE Asia rainforests, and the terraced Andes were intensely engineered, designed, managed locations, and I assume with less direct knowledge that so were most of the invaded parts of Africa. Colonists came and assumed untouched nature, falsely. And that, explicitly, is “Kinda”‘s situation, only even more so.
February 18, 2024 @ 5:55 pm
Yeah, but having advanced technology shouldn’t actually be a requirement for being allowed to exist.
March 4, 2024 @ 12:22 pm
Huh? Nobody — not “Kinda”, nor Elizabeth, nor I — suggested otherwise.
February 12, 2024 @ 12:00 pm
2022? Shouldn’t it say 2018?
February 12, 2024 @ 12:11 pm
Yeah. 2022 is when I wrote the essay, but that is indeed just confusing now.
February 12, 2024 @ 3:12 pm
To echo your thoughts at the end – this is the only Chibnall era episode so far where you’ve mentioned the characters in your essay and I was immediately able to remember who they were. 5 years, three and a half season’s worth of episodes, and this is the only one that had even that much of an effect on me. What is, in the context of the era it originates from, an absolute peak of pathos (and “aboutness” as you said), is in the context of other prestige television shows laughably below average.
February 12, 2024 @ 6:37 pm
Absolutely – a lot to like here especially in that it does new things with the show (or at least unusual things). The Doctor’s passivity in the face of events is handled better here than in Rosa and paralleled by the aliens.
And yet, it is still riddled with flaws. If it sat within a stronger season, that would be easier to ignore but not in one of the best episodes. And even here the show still doesn’t know what to do with Yaz in a fundamentally Yaz-centric episode.
February 13, 2024 @ 6:37 am
I rewatched this a few months ago, and while it does work quite well as an episode, it feels really dragged down by being part of a show that just isn’t working. Most clearly, the episode is obligated to find roles for Yaz, Graham, and Ryan, but the series so far has done almost nothing to establish them as interesting personalities. (For all its flaws, I think Kerblam does a pretty incredible job tackling the same problem, but the premise of that episode suits it better.)
I think this episode could have been a lot, lot stronger if it had been allowed to ditch Graham and Ryan and give their time to Yaz’s family and the Yaz-Doctor relationship. Even then, it would have been an uphill battle working with Yaz as such a blank slate! Imagine if this had been the 6th episode of Pearl Mackie as Bill rather than the 6th episode of Mandip Gill as Yaz! By this time, we’d seen a lot of Bill in a lot of moods and situations, and I feel confident that Mackie would have been able to make some really interesting performance choices with this material and the established character. In contrast, Yaz has been so generic up to now that the best Gill is able to pull off is “broadly sympathetic human going through a tough time.”
Ryan is served worst. About 8 minutes in, he gets the line: “Oh yeah, I could go to a wedding every day if I could,” presumably because he’s been hovering silently in the background for more than 3 minutes. It’s his biggest line of the episode so far, superceding: “Yeah, I’m well up for it.” It’s phrased strangely, completely humourless, and tells us nothing about the world, plot, or characters except possibly that Ryan is a person who phrases things strangely. In the mouth of a character who was like, more extroverted than average or a hopeless romantic, it could at least serve to reinforce a personality but that just doesn’t seem to be who Ryan is. This is arguably the Chibnall era at its best, and yet this line is surely more utterly worthless than anything you could find anywhere in series 1-10. Even in Davies and Moffat episodes far worse than Demons of the Punjab, they were able to give their scripts a veneer of lively sitcom dialogue, but Chibnall just doesn’t seem capable of that (as a script editor, I mean).
I agree though, that this was basically a good episode and a good move for the show, and I would have preferred to watch the series keep trying to do this kind of thing, hopefully pulling it off increasingly well, rather than the pivot to Doctor Who about Doctor Who in Series 12 and beyond.
February 13, 2024 @ 11:56 am
Here’s a curious moment of insight into what I found one of the frustrating parts of the Chibnall years: “As with Rosa, it feels like its primary goal is to be able to say that Doctor Who has done a story about Partition.”
What I couldn’t stand was the anemic publicity style of Doctor Who when Chibnall was in charge. Nothing specific, no hooks or images or funky images about the stories at all, were ever really used with any prominence in marketing the show. You’ve described it as being freakishly averse to spoilers of any kind, as if knowing the facts of the story were all anyone cared about in the unfolding of a story. That’s right. But there’s also the weirdness of content-free publicity.
If you primarily cared about protecting the audience from spoilers, you could still do interesting, engaging trailers and previews using a bait-and-switch style. Use some clips and images in the advertising to make the audience think the story is about one kind of thing, but have it actually be about another. Surprise reveals, sudden plot twists that change the premise around. Those are great. But Chibnall seems to think that all anyone cares about in Doctor Who is that Doctor Who is here. “Stand in front of this nondescript background, everyone on Doctor Who. Now, when people see this publicity photo, they will look at the date and know that Doctor Who will be here soon.” All that seems to matter in Chibnall’s perspective is that there is Doctor Who, that Doctor Who is here doing this story. Doctor Who was, as of now, present at the India-Pakistan Partition. Just like the concept of the passive Doctor, all that matters is mere presence, not action.
February 13, 2024 @ 10:54 pm
“modern Doctor Who is a lot better suited to moral clarity than it is to poignant ambivalences”
I prefer Classic, for all its flaws, over Modern Era, and you have just precisely articulated exactly what I couldn’t put into words, and didn’t consciously know, until I read what you wrote.
Thank you.
February 17, 2024 @ 11:09 am
Way back in the Troughton volume you offered a great explanation of why the pure historical had to die: because being unable to change history clashes with the idea of the Doctor as an active, heroic figure that fight evil. “Demons…”, being an almost pure historical, is the perfect showcase for that argument. The Doctor witnesses the horrors of the past, gets sad about them and leaves. It damn near destroys the entire point of the character (or it would have, had 13 not been designed as an ineffective figure right from the start).
Are there ways around that problem? Sure, and the new series has already offered a few. The obvious point of comparison is “Fires of Pompeii” where the answer to the question “what does the Doctor do when they’re helpless?” turns out to be “they find a way to help someone anyway”. But “Demons” doesn’t really use that. The Doctor’s influence on the plot is negligible.
The whole Chibnall era’s approach to the horrors of the past is disturbing. I guess “Demons” at least deserves praise for not making the Doctor and the companions actively complicit in making sure those horrors happen, like in “Rosa”.