With You Behind The Mirrors (It Takes You Away)
It’s December 2nd, 2018. Ariana Grande continues her dominion over the charts. The rest of the top ten simply shuffles, save for the entrance of Ava Max to the top ten. All is sameness. Nothing ever changes. In news, the Yellow Vest movement erupts in France. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen pleads guilty of lying to Congress as part of his general turn against his former employer. Brexit continues to be a complete fucking shambles. Like I said, nothing changes.
While on television, It Takes You Away. Lance Parkin, when espousing his distaste for the Chibnall era on Facebook, likes to point to this episode, and specifically the beat at the end in which Ryan informs Graham, “Yaz said you saw Nan in there.” And fair enough, this is the sort of line that an even vaguely competent editor would circle and, if they’re being polite, leave a note to the effect of “I think this emotional beat needs more,” instead of what they are actually thinking here, which is “how the fuck did you fail to give Ryan a single reaction scene to the return of his dead grandmother?” It’s immensely hackish, mediocre, and lazy writing, in the same way that shaky-cam and some blue lit foam rubber rocks is immensely hackish, mediocre, and lazy representation of a collapsing antizone. And that’s before you get to minor but revealing questions like “I wonder exactly at what point during preproduction anyone at the BBC thought to call the effects team and double check that they can do a convincing frog, and why, after an answer that must have just been five minutes of laughing down the phone, they put it in the script anyway,” which, although in practice it just led to a kind of charming giant rat moment, does not exactly speak well of the basic ability of this creative team to make television.
On the other hand, although its ineptitudes are particularly jarring, there’s a competence here that the era usually lacks. There are emotional throughlines that get where they’re going, if not always with especial grace. On the whole, this is an easy episode to like. There’s a genuine weirdness to it—a conventional light horror opening gives way to the weird children’s dark fantasy of the antizone, as for essentially the first time ever we get Doctor Who’s version of Labyrinth. And then this in turn gives way to a conclusion about a lonely cosmic force that wants to be a frog and have a friend. It’s bonkers, but in the best possible ways, a “mad as in exiting” buzz of ideas that freely revels in the basic joy of Doctor Who’s flexibility. This is the sort of thing that, broadly speaking, I eat up in Doctor Who, and would be fundamentally pretty delightful even in an era where this was a bit below par, as it should be, instead of a highlight.
So once again we find ourselves with the basic issue that’s underlaid this run of four posts covering the non-Chibnall portions of Series 11. One of the fundamental bitter ironies of the Chibnall era is that the era in which Doctor Who had one of its all-time worst primary writers was also an era in which that writer had an outsized influence on the scripts, his name appearing on all but seven episodes of the era. This stretch of four is the most substantive period in which the Chibnall era and the Whittaker era are even vaguely different things, and so becomes the natural place to look for any imagining of what could have been.
Of course, this is ultimately an illusion of transmission. It Takes You Away was the second episode filmed, so that Sharon D Clarke could appear in it. This is a team still coming together—essentially doing their first proper story, which goes a long way towards explaining the slightly manic energy this crackles with. And the four stories that make this era of alternate possibilities are strewn out over production, one per block counterbalancing a Chibnall script (with Rosa and The Ghost Monument getting made together). There’s no period of near-miss possibility. Just some scripts that Chibnall was too busy laboring over things like The Tsuranga Conundrum and Arachnids in the UK to fuss with excessively.
But that’s what second and third stories usually are—roads not taken. The Davies era never did anything quite so “let’s make something that feels exactly like the classic series” as The Unquiet Dead again. The Beast Below and Victory of the Daleks are distinctly outside the realm of what Moffat would settle on. What’s unusual is just that this got shunted as late in the season as it was—all the other examples were second filming block stories that aired quite early on in the run. But what we have here is still recognizably early run variability—a story that went out despite not being what the show was really aiming for. It’s just that this time, the road not taken was “vague quality.”
There are a number of things to point out here. For one, we could unpick some of the other “road not taken” elements here—the full-throated embrace of science fantasy, for instance, and the one moment in which the Chibnall era legitimately feels post-Moffat as opposed to a constantly tedious attempt at a prelapsarian counterreformation. There’s the glimmer of actual characterization for Whittaker’s Doctor in her instantaneous friendship with the Solitract. There’s the reinterpretation of the Doctor’s past as the sort of mad whimsy to contain things like Granny Five, which could be amusingly contrasted with certain future reinterpretations of the Doctor’s past.
But I think the first and foremost is a final crack at the tacit question we’ve been asking in many of these posts on the early phase of the Chibnall era, namely “what else could this have been?” Because the thing about a road not taken is that it was, at least, considered enough to be done. The Unquiet Dead may have been a neoclassicism of the sort that Davies would ultimately eschew, but it’s not like he didn’t spend loads of time thinking about how to take tropes from the classic series and do them in the 21st century, or like he didn’t hire Mark Gatiss again and consider him a third time. Moffat would end up exploring the fairy tale dynamics of The Beast Below and, eventually, some of the political anger—the oddity is simply that he was doing them at the same time, and with such brazen confidence that no effort to mediate between them was needed. These roads not taken are ultimately defined by the narcissism of small differences—they are important as much because they were tried once as because they weren’t tried again.
In this regard it’s worth thinking back to our overture to the era, the Pop Between Realities on Star Trek: Discovery, and its faltering efforts to reinvent the mid-90s cult television paradigm for the 21st century. Because ultimately It Takes You Away feels like nothing so much as a strong and slightly odd monster of the week episode of The X-Files. Sure, yes, it has the emotional beat of Ryan calling Graham “grandad” for the first time, which is the payoff to a plot that’s been around since the first episode, albeit one that’s basically been ignored since The Ghost Monument, in no small part presumably because this was originally thought of as something that would air early on in the run. But for the most part this has no real ambitions beyond filling one of the commissioned episode slots for its season.
That’s nothing new, of course. Under the Lake/Before the Flood, Hide, The Lazarus Experiment, and The Unquiet Dead had similar ambitions or lack thereof. And some of them are even perfectly good episodes of television. But at the end of the day, they’re filler, just as their 90s predecessors were. Doctor Who historically needed less filler because it only had thirteen twelve ten episodes per year season compared to the twenty-two of a standard American network series, but all the same, sometimes you needed to just do an episode that filled time. There’s no shame in that. That’s just the material realities of television production.
It’s worth noting, however, that It Takes You Away goes further than that. Fundamentally, this is an episode held together by its genre tropes. Again, this is nothing new—the entire modern series has made up for its dramatically shortened runtimes compared to classic stories by leaning on the familiarity of genre instead of on actually introducing and developing concepts. But it’s astonishing just how much It Takes You Away leans on this. The transition into the antizone is spectacularly unearned, getting by entirely on the fact that all of the fantasy tropes being played with are familiar enough that it doesn’t have to be. The Solitract is similarly unbuilt to. Instead it’s just trusting that you can throw a quickly delivered bit of exposition at the audience and they’ll be the sorts of people who get it. And fine, yes, in the age of Marvel making hundreds of millions of dollars gross on films that depend on Disney+ series to set them up this is probably actually a safe assumption.
Nevertheless, what we have here is the somewhat ghoulish specter of the TV Movie’s ambitions for Doctor Who coming to pass. Here is the show that was trying to be—a week in/week out revolving door of sci-fi stuff done for the benefit of people who like sci-fi stuff and basically no one else. This was never an especially worthwhile idea, predicated as it is on a longstanding misunderstanding of what Doctor Who was that assumed that since it had sci-fi tropes it must be first and foremost about the play of those sci-fi tropes. Whereas the entire reason I’m able to write this blog is that this wasn’t what Doctor Who historically was, and it mostly still isn’t what it is.
Its trial in 1996 was inevitable. Its persistence in spin-off media is understandable, since the basic existence of Big Finish and its “people want to spend hundreds of pounds a month on Doctor Who” business model depends on the existence of fans who are, well, fans. It’s not the only thing spinoff media can be, but it’s inevitably something spinoff media is going to be. And frankly, it’s simply an inevitable part of Doctor Who at this point—the misapprehension of it as a show that is about sci-fi has gone on long enough to be a hyperstition such that it is, now, a Sci-Fi Franchise, even if it stubbornly manages to hold onto other existences as well. So in that regard, it ws inevitable that someone would try again on this approach—that we would get another era that thinks that the things Doctor Who should be most similar to are Star Trek and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s not a good idea, but it was an inevitable thing to slog through on the way to better ideas. If it hadn’t been Chibnall it would have been Whithouse or someone similar.
The success case for this approach is, basically, It Takes You Away: broad confidence and a sense of weirdness. The punishingly intense production model of American network television in which the cult approach arose was, in effect, a randomizer. Throw twenty-two episodes of television a year at a wall and some of them will be interesting. It Takes You Away is the time it does.
And yet we have to remember where we started on this point: this is the road not taken. Nothing that worked here was learned from. Nothing followed from it. Any conclusion drawn from its existence would necessarily be apophenic. This is one of the moments of watching through the Chibnall era that’s broadly tolerable. That, in the end, is enough of an accomplishment.
March 4, 2024 @ 7:11 am
I was dreading this post. Not much, just a little bit. But still – the Whittaker era Eruditorum has been pretty merciless so far, which is largely justified. It’s a bad era, for sure. But It Takes You Away is the one episode in this era I genuinely love. It’s the only one that just… clicked for me. The shifting genres, the Doctor’s compelling characterization, the Adamsian living universe that’s also a frog… This is imo the best episode of the whole era. And, like you said, nothing followed from this, and nothing was learned. Which is just painful. This episode really is a window into an alternative reality where this era did interesting things.
March 4, 2024 @ 11:35 pm
“This is imo the best episode of the whole era.”
I agree. Mostly because of the frog.
March 4, 2024 @ 7:35 am
Hey now, the frog looks great. The lip-synching is off. Which might be how that phone call actually went. “Can you do a good-looking CGI frog?” “Sure…”, without Chibnall’s quite bothering to add that it would need also to talk.
March 4, 2024 @ 8:33 am
I loved this episode on first watch, and I still quite like it for its sheer chutzpah. But on rewatches I keep noticing some really bad directorial choices.
The bit in the shed with the dead birds really gets to me. We clearly see them in the middle of the frame, Ryan walks in, and then reacts with shock to something we can already see.
The episode manages to bungle a jump scare.
March 4, 2024 @ 10:39 am
What kills this episode for me more than anything is, actually, the Solitract doing all this in search of a friend. I am not sold on Jodi’s instant friendship with it. She’s charming for five minutes and then goes “Okay, but actually I’d rather if you slag off and die alone now”. I remember going on dates where I or the other person was normally able to be charming for well over five minutes before delivering that message; the other of us was not, even then, left feeling like the beneficiaries of a sincere connection. And that was after efforts on the order of “Dress nicely then get in the car and drive for ten minutes”, rather than “transform into an adorable frog, then upend the borders between realities”.
March 4, 2024 @ 7:22 pm
This made me wonder if science fiction is the means through which Doctor Who manifests other genres, but then I thought that the same could be said of a large amount of SF, starting with Star Trek: The Next Generation. SF has always been metaphorical and attached to other kinds of storytelling. Does it ever have its own, pure identity? Maybe some of Greg Egan’s stuff.
March 5, 2024 @ 1:36 am
The Solitract realm represents modern neofascist pagan ideals. It’s a chaotic demiurge in the form of a frog that exists on the other side of a magic mirror that steals a girl’s dad away because he’s depressed and losing contact with his real family.
That’s all I got. Also I like the “Why do you have bear traps everywhere?” “Because there are bears.” exchange, that’s cute.
March 5, 2024 @ 2:06 am
The frog scene is not only my favorite scene in Chibnall Who, it’s up there with my favorite scenes in all of Doctor Who. The strangeness of it, grounded in the emotion of the Solitract’s terrible loneliness. The Whitaker Doctor as an endlessly kind and empathetic seeker and lover of wonders; I absolutely believed her when she said she’d happily stay with the Solitract if she could, just to get to explore a whole new universe. (Apologies to the poster above for whom this scene had terrible analogues in their own life.) And the music. It’s my favorite bit of music Segun Akinola composed for the show. I really liked Akinola overall, but I wish the era had had more episodes like this to give him more weird wonder to work with.
So far as roads not taken, I’d argue that “Can You Hear Me?” (a story I know you didn’t think much of; I liked it a lot more than you did) at least tries to be the weird, anything can happen, emotionally resonant fantasy story of season 12, though the fantasy elements don’t land there anywhere near as well as they do here. But it does seem to me like an attempt to hit that same vibe. Who knows, maybe Chibnall originally planned to hit that vibe once a year? On first broadcast, “It Takes You Away” felt like a promise that the show wouldn’t completely forget to be strange, which was reassuring, even if once a year is far too infrequent for my tastes.
March 5, 2024 @ 9:48 am
Oh, nothing terrible — I aimed for whimsical exaggeration, and in the absence of voice/ face cues, I clearly missed. It’s just we’re getting different things from the scene: to me, the ability to ooze empathy for a few minutes and then say “No” is one of the most ordinary human social skills. I’m glad you get something more from the scene, so love it all you want! But the wonder and conviction aren’t there for me personally, and I don’t think, without the Doctor doing anything real for the Solitract, they could have been.
March 5, 2024 @ 2:17 pm
This isn’t exactly to do with what you’re saying here, but if I may I’ll spring-board off your “without the Doctor doing anything real for the Solitract” comment:
I remember at the time of broadcast that some fans were pretty upset with the decision to leave the Solitract alone at the end of the story, especially given the resolution to the other ‘problematic relationship’ (Erik’s with his Not-Real dead wife) was to ensure he returns to the real world of his daughter and his friends. But I think some of the objections might have been conflating two things: (a) when people deal with grief by seeking isolation, letting grief ‘take you away’ as Erik does, which is addressed by the need to grow up, accept your responsibilities, and live in the real world (more specifically in his case: being a proper parent for Hanne); and (b) dealing with isolation by constantly trying to draw others in, by honey-trap or emotional manipulation, and then growing up by no longer doing that, accepting that you’re enough and do not NEED to depend on other people (as the Doctor says to the Solitract, “keep on being brilliant by yourself”). So, yes, on a literal level of ‘if-this-frog-universe-really-existed’ it seems like a cruel plot resolution, but as a metaphor and counterpoint to Erik it’s quite effective.
(It would probably be all the more so if the episode had spent a bit longer at the very end on just how badly they’re going to need Social Services to investigate Erik’s behaviour, and probably bucket-loads of therapy, rather than just the wishy-washy stuff about getting back to society and friendship circles. Although I suppose most DW stories ought to have the unspoken corollary about the guest cast that “and they all went along to therapy for several years afterwards”).
March 5, 2024 @ 2:35 pm
Yeah, the lack of any real call-out for Erik’s behavior towards Hanne and acknowledgement of how it might affect his relationship with her going forward is, for me, the episode’s biggest flaw (and hoo boy, it’s a biggie). Its absence is so glaring – Erik never even apologizes to her – that it makes me wonder if there was a cut scene or a bit of cut dialogue. Really, it would have only taken a few lines. But this is the Chibnall era, so it also would not surprise me if nobody quite thought this element through. Sigh.
March 6, 2024 @ 7:39 pm
Yes exactly. This is really the only one in the era I’ve had particular desire to watch again, and there’s lots to love about it – but it relies on just deciding not to think about Erik’s torturing of Hanne.
As you say, a few lines could be enough to see that the episode acknowledged it, even if it wouldn’t be enough to make it ‘okay’.
And now I’m thinking about 9t, I wonder if actually that makes this worse than Kerblam! in that regard. Becasue Kerblam, whilst it ends up being evil in the service of a narrative twist, at least has the blackly ironic line about the staff getting a month off with 2 weeks pay which to flagrantly signal that something is wrong here, even if the satire overall can’t quite decide what it’s target is. But It Takes You Away doesn’t even manage that.
March 5, 2024 @ 5:21 am
The Nordic folk horror setting was cool. The frog universe was a good rug-pull, heel turn, WTF moment that, pleasingly, had some NMD fans get their knickers in a twist. I genuinely thought the Doctor might choose to stay with her new friend in a new magical universe and, briefly, was made to contemplate what that might mean for the show (Oddly I think it might have meant we got The RTD2 magical realism era a few years early! So it’s no surprise Hard SF Chibnall swerved it).
The other bits of sub Gaiman/Pratchett whimsy could have, (like in all of Whittaker’s episodes), benefited from a further editorial pass. However, ‘It Takes You Away’ is the only story from this era I remember with any fondness.
March 5, 2024 @ 8:06 am
I don’t mind that the frog isn’t that convincing because it specifically is a fake frog. Inhabiting the uncanny valley a little or not quite passing the authenticity test is arguably exactly what the effect should be going for.
And yeah, in retrospect this is the high water mark of the entire era. I used to think Demons of the Punjab took that prize, but that one has shrunk in my estimation since first watching it whereas It Takes You Away has grown (and I’d gladly rewatch ITYA it sooner than anything else in Jodie’s run). As good as DotP is in many respects, there’s the at best softballed, at worst sanitised politics you identify, plus fundamentally it puts a lot of narrative weight on multiple people closely examining a dead body and failing to notice a fatal gunshot wound.
March 5, 2024 @ 10:51 am
The overwhelmingly positive reaction to the frog scene in this episode was one of the things that made me realize that I don’t really enjoy this level of weirdness in my media. The scene just made me raise my eyebrows and disengage emotionally from what was, until that point, an unusually interesting and enjoyable episode of the Chibnall era.
Thanks for another great essay.
March 5, 2024 @ 11:41 am
I don’t think I’ve rewatched any of the 13th Doctor episodes, so I’m not sure if I have a strong opinion on the “best” Chibnall era episode. But I do remember that this was pretty much the only episode to give me anything near the same level of emotional engagement as the best Davies and Moffat era episodes. This was the first time in Series 11 that I felt that the show was even approaching the usual high water mark established for the new series, and sadly I don’t think it ever got as far again (though there were episodes here and there that I found enjoyable enough).
Incidentally, I was shocked at reading that four episodes was the longest stretch without Chibnall’s name on the writing credit. I suppose some of that is due to the shorter seasons, but still… (For comparison, for Davies it is 8, in Series 4, and for Moffat it is 6, in Series 5 or 7b.) I also noticed that cowriting credits became more common in the Capaldi era, so I wonder if some of this also reflects BBC policy regarding writing credits.