Whittaker

It’s October 7^th, 2018. Calvin Harris and Sam Smith are at number one with “Promises,” with Marshmello/Bastille, Kanye West/Lil Pum, Silk City/Dua Lipa, and Rita Ora also charting. Since Peter Capaldi and David Bradley regenerated, the US government briefly shut down despite Republican control of Congress and the Presidency, Kay Goldsworthy became the first female Archbishop in the Anglican Communion, a school shooting happened in Parkland, Florida, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un met in Singapore, the first ever meeting between leaders of the two countries, noted actress Meghan Markle married an unemployed socialite, Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul, and a Swedish student named Greta Thunberg began a school strike to protest Climate change.

On television, meanwhile, The Woman Who Fell To Earth. The most important thing to realize about this is just how much everyone desperately wanted it to work. For all the noise about people not liking the idea of a female Doctor, nearly eleven million people tuned in to watch this, only the third time Doctor Who has ever managed to be the top-rated show on television for the week. For all that would happen down the road, this was a piece of television that went out to a large and sympathetic audience. Rewatching it five years later, you can still see that sense of optimism—that hope that it could all work out. Those of us familiar with Chibnall’s ouvre were largely more pessimistic, but you can go look at my review at the time and see the way in which it remained hopeful, finding the good points to seize onto. It’s not that nobody wished this era malice from the start, but the people who did were all misogynistic fucks who should be ignored on principle. The rest of us were rooting for it.

This, of course, made the result all the more crushing, and knowing what we do, it’s easy to look at this and see the flaws that would soon come to define the Chibnall era. But there’s a whole era of stories that don’t have this aura of hope and anticipated progress in which to discuss those flaws. Everyone always praises this project for its determined focus on the historical context of episodes, so let’s play to our old school strengths and peer into the shockingly distant world of 2018 and see what this was, on its own terms, such as they are.

Within the modern series, after all, a new Doctor episode is a mission statement. Not quite a manifesto—they generally have too much to do in order to pull that off—but a mission statement—a declaration of aesthetics. Rose made it clear that this was a modern post-Buffy bit of genre television with a clear eye on the history of Doctor Who. The Christmas Invasion, by focusing on everything it wasn’t changing before finally slotting David Tennant into place, declared its continuity with its hit predecessor series. The Eleventh Hour declared change, establishing the nocturnal fairy tale that would serve as Moffat’s aesthetic brand.…

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By 2018, when Chris Chibnall commenced the third primary creative era of the modern Doctor Who, media franchises were not so much increasingly the norm as wholly established as the norm. These were the days when high profile returns of long dormant franchises were the norm, whether in the form of outright revivals as things like Murphy Brown and Roseanne staggered from their graves for a new season, or in the ever popular form of reboots, with Lost in Space, Magnum, P.I., DuckTales, Charmed, and She-Ra all making returns. Film was much the same—nine of the top ten films in 2018 were installments of pre-existing franchises, four of them based on Marvel Comics properties. (This was in fact low—2017 and 2019 were each ten for ten, where 2018 had the differently nostalgic Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody to break things up.) These are the sorts of facts that make you start to sympathize deeply with Alan Moore at his crankiest. 

Curiously absent from this tendency thus far was Star Trek. Sure there’d been the three Chris Pine movies set in what is apparently widely referred to within fandom as the Kelvin Timeline, but this was a shocking meager return—three films from 2006-2016—for one of the two most iconic American sci-fi franchises, especially in an era when fandoms and franchises were so very much the norm. And so it was much overdue in late 2017 when CBS launched their streaming exclusive Star Trek: Discovery, the first attempt at a Star Trek TV show in over a decade. Unfortunately, the result had much to say bout the painfully cynical nature of franchise media in the late 2010s. 

To start, the show had what can only be called a troubled development. It was originally the product of Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller, who pitched an anthology series that would move to a new ship and era of Star Trek history with each season, starting just before the original 1960s series. Fuller worked on the show for the better part of a year before being sacked for failing to adhere to CBS’s over-ambitious production timeline for the show, and was replaced by Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harbets, who would eventually find themselves sacked for going over budget and for stories of abusive behavior during production. A microcosm of the tensions in play here comes with the discussion over uniforms, with Fuller originally wanting something that was based on the brightly colored 1960s uniforms, while CBS insisted on a more austere and military-style uniform, continuity (and for that matter nostalgia aesthetics) be damned. It’s a small thing, but indicative—the sort of thing that quietly speaks volumes about just how cynical an effort this actually was.

So it’s not a surprise that the resultant show was not good. If anything it’s a mild surprise that it was not bad either. Instead it hovers along at a vague watchability—a level that’s clearly tremendously disappointing from any perspective that holds a lot of hope about what Star Trek could be in 2017.…

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