More likely than not, aliens invented airplanes.

It’s May 27th, 2017. Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber remain at number one with “Despacito,” while Liam Payne, Charlie Puth, Harry Styles, and DJ Khaled also chart. Narrowly missing the top ten is Ariana Grande’s “One Last Time,” which re-enters the charts more than two years after its last appearance. This provides us a grim transition to the news, where a terrorist attack at the Manchester Arena kills twenty-two people during one of her concerts. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey stage their final circus show, while on the day of this story six out of seven leaders at the G7 summit reaffirm their commitment to the Paris climate accord. No points for guessing who the odd man out is.

Meanwhile, on television, we have The Pyramid at the End of the World. The Pyramid at the End of the Worldmay or may not have the messiest gestation of any Moffat era story. Certainly it has the messiest one to play out in public. Announcement of Harness’s involvement was left extremely late, and when it came he was laden with the season’s only cowriting credit. The story of this finally emerged in Doctor Who Magazinein Ben Cook’s preview of the episode, in which Moffat made an unprecedented public apology to Harness for how the story was handled. Describing his drafts as dazzling, Moffat notes that he “was imposing too many things on Peter—put this in, put that in,” and explains that the final draft of The Pyramid at the End of the Worldcame due at the same time that Moffat’s mother fell ill, and that Moffat, lacking the time to work closely with Harness to polish the script, literally wrote the final draft by his mother’s deathbed. As he puts it, “I don’t feel great about that—Peter deserved better from me, frankly.” Clearly this is an immensely sad story, and a reaction along the lines of blame or second-guessing the decisions that got made is beyond unhelpful. Nevertheless, the archeology project of excavating the stories that The Pyramid at the End of the Worldcould have become is interesting and fruitful in its own right. And since I happen to have all of the draft scripts handy…

The Pyramid at the End of the Worldbegan life as a script entitled We Dare Not Go a-Hunting, was submitted on April 28, 2016 (Drake was at number one with “One Dance”). This was to be the first part of a two-parter, the second half of which would be called For Fear of Little Men. Harness never wrote a full draft of part two—there’s about twelve pages of loose scenes (compared to 49 pages of the fully drafted We Dare Not Go a-Hunting). Behind the scenes, what went wrong here was simple: Harness had a vacation scheduled that conflicted with the required production schedule, and so his contribution was pared down to a single episode, with Toby Whithouse assigned to write the concluding half of the story. …

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Don’t worry, Doctor, I’m sure the Chibnall era will be fine

It’s May 20^th, 2017. Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber remain at number one with “Despacito.” J Hus, Ed Sheeran, Shawn Mendes, Clean Bandit, and French Montana also chart, the latter presumably introducing enough consumer confusion to explain Miley Cyrus being stuck at #11. In news, Chelsea Manning is released from prison. It emerges just how bad Trump’s firing of James Comey was, resulting in the appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate Russia’s interference in the election. Trump makes his first foreign visit as President, to Saudi Arabia, leading to that low key amazing supervillain photo of Trump, the king of Saudi Arabia, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi all touching that glowing white globe.

On television, meanwhile, Extremis. Let’s set aside, for a moment, the monks arc as a whole; there’s time enough to talk about what could have been, what was, and how that happened. Contrary to the greatest moment of Jack’s podcasting career, Extremis is too interesting for that. That said, the monk arc hangs over it in that there is no way to talk about Extremis without talking about failure. In many regards, Moffat set this story up for failure from the moment of its promotion, describing it as a weird experimental piece in the vein of Listen and Heaven Sent, which is to say holding it up to a standard that one doesn’t need the rest of the fingers on your hand to count off the other stories to meet. Extremis is done no favors by being the successor story to these when it is, in reality, a slightly hasty hodgepodge that’s trying to do the Missy reveal and set up the monks arc without necessarily having a clear idea why these two things to together.

The result is decidedly one of Moffat’s failures. But while that list contains cringeworthy banalities like The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe, it also contains things like The Beast Below that, while they might not quite come together as episodes of television, are still fascinating and basically delightful. Extremis falls into the later camp: an episode that does not belong anywhere near anyone’s lists of Moffat’s greatest triumphs, but that is nevertheless profoundly satisfying to delve into.

The thing that makes Extremis fascinating and compelling is that for all its hot mess tendencies, it’s one of those Doctor Who stories that are remarkably plugged into the zeitgeist. Simulationism is the sort of fun science idea you write about in 2017 the same way you did black holes in 1973. Add reincarnation on computers, escaping AIs, and ideas that drive you mad and you have one of the most shockingly on the nose Doctor Who episodes ever, at least from the perspective of the bitch who wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk.

To some extent, despite literally writing the book on it, I’m in no position to explain why these ideas go together.…

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I heard they had a space program; when they sing you can’t hear there’s no air

It’s May 13^th, 2017. Luis Fonsi is at number one with the Despacito remix. DJ Khaled, Ed Sheeran, French Montana, and Shawn Mendes also chart. In news, the WannaCry ransomware attack goes off, affecting hundreds of thousands of computers in a hundred and fifty countries, with major effects on the NHS. And Donald Trump fires FBI director James Comey on the pretext of an objection to his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, but in reality, as Trump admits the next day in a meeting with Russian officials in which he also shares classified intelligence obtained from Israel, in an attempt to derail investigations into his campaign’s involvement in Russian attempts to influence his election.

On television, meanwhile, Oxygen. It is traditional, especially towards the end of an era, for me to take a good story that I enjoy and write an entry that is generally quite down on it. Even when writing the review of Oxygen, it was obvious that this would be the Capaldi story I did it to. The point of that exercise, after all, is not to indulge in the spurious pleasure of complaining or of contrarianism. Rather, it’s something baked into this project’s approach to Doctor Who, which holds that the show has a mandate to change and do better that applies equally to good eras and bad. If I don’t show the inadequacies of its triumphs, I’m not doing my job. And Oxygen was perfect for this: the most overtly anti-capitalist story in Doctor Who, written by one of the great writers of the era. I could either worship at its feet or be unsatisfied. The latter is more interesting by far.

What surprised me when actually rewatching it, then, was how much the episode made my job easy by failing to quite engage me in the first place. Upon initial airing, this was a huge sigh of relief after a desperately uneven first third to the season. Revisited two years later, its grim and gunly traditionalism stands out as an aggressive conservatism. It gets away with this for the simple reason that Jamie Mathieson is very good, and is capable of pulling off the minimum requirement of such an aggressively traditionalist-pandering story, which is to actually do everything basically perfectly. But the fact that only a writer like Mathieson would make this exercise worthwhile is not the same as the exercise actually being a good idea. More than anything else this season and possibly anything else in the Moffat era, this is a cynical box-checking exercise informed by GallifreyBase notions of what fans want. This is rearguard action, designed to placate a particular sort of hater. 

It is in light of this that we need to look at this story’s politics. The first thing to note is that the aesthetic conservatism helps the story get away with the anticapitalism. To make a very obvious point, Series 11 not only has nothing that’s even close to this story’s level of overt leftism, it contains Kerblam!…

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Is this some kind of joke?

It’s May 6th, 2017. DJ Khaled is at number one with “I’m the One,” backed by Justin Bieber, Quavo, Chance the Rapper, and Lil Wayne. Ed Sheeran, Drake, and Shawn Mendes also chart, as do Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, who see their Spanish-language “Despacito” jump from 22nd to 4th on the back of another Justin Bieber guest appearance. In news, it is announced that Prince Philip will be stepping down from his public engagements in the fall, and local elections see the Tories make heavy gains. Impressively, nothing really happens in the US. Don’t worry. We’ll make up for it next week.

On television, meanwhile, we have Knock Knock. If Thin Ice represents the optimistic long-term future of Doctor Who—the bit of 2017 that most resembles what one might hope for from 2027, then Knock Knock is the bit of 2017 that most accurately prefigures 2018. And the fact that this entry spent the better part of a week consisting of that previous sentence and nothing more speaks volumes as to what that’s going to be like for me. Knock Knock is a true oddity within the Moffat era in that it steadfastly refuses to cohere into anything. It’s a messy and misshapen thing that doesn’t have much to say and isn’t sure how to say it, but that never goes far enough off the rails for it to be fun to just angrily dismantle it. It’s just sort of there, taking up time between Thin Ice and Oxygen. 

Still, we’re going to have to get used to dealing with this sort of shit, so let’s have at it. The obvious starting point is Moffat’s celebrity writers initiative. Throughout his tenure, Moffat has made a point of commissioning the writers of other hit series for Doctor Who. Starting with Simon Nye and Richard Curtis in Series Five and continuing through Neils Gaiman and Cross, the practice seemed to wind down with the Capaldi era only to, in his final season, come back with an aim towards making up for lost time. We’ll deal with the second one of these—a Scottish playwright who worked with Ken Loach—later, but Mike Bartlett was hired off of the tremendously successful Doctor Foster, a Suranne Jones led thriller about marital infidelity. 

This approach has generally worked for Moffat. Sure, Gaiman’s second script was something of a wet fart, but Vincent and the Doctor remains an oft-cited highlight of his tenure, The Doctor’s Wifeis infuriatingly good, and Rings of Akhaten is potentially the most underrated story of the new series. It also served to get a number of interesting and compelling voices into Doctor Who, even if four out of five prestigious television writers hired by Moffat were white guys, and none were people of color. We still got takes on Doctor Who from some major writers who wouldn’t normally bother writing single episodes of a TV show as work for hire. And Bartlett seems on paper like an obvious choice—Doctor Foster was a massive hit, and Bartlett was a long-time Doctor Who fan who chatted happily to Doctor Who Magazine about his memories of the McCoy era.…

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The Doctor and Bill frantically try to warn Chibnall off his staffing decisions.

It’s April 29th, 2017. Clean Bandit and Zara Larsson are at number one with “Symphony.” Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles, Kendrick Lamar, Shawn Mendes, and Jason Derulo (backed with Nicki Minaj and Ty) also chart. In news, things are fairly sleepy. Work begins in New Orleans to dismantle some Confederate memorials. Anthony Joshua becomes WBA heavyweight champion. It’s a slow week. We don’t get those very often anymore.

On television, meanwhile, Thin Ice As we’ve discussed, one of the major features of the Capaldi era, especially compared to the Smith era, is Moffat’s development of a stable of writers who can fill out a large portion of every season with solid, compelling results. The core of this are Jamie Mathieson, Peter Harness, and Sarah Dollard, who among them contribute at least three of the non-Moffat scripts in each of Capaldi’s seasons, and thus ensuring a minimum of seven episodes every season that were good or better. Add in Gatiss’s late career bloom and the reason the Capaldi era is such a golden age becomes clear even before you start thinking about Moffat’s own late style renaissance.

Of that core stable, Dollard is the oddity, in that she arrived in Series Nine and only did two episodes. Harness and Mathieson each have twice as many data points from which to draw conclusions about their interests and work. With Dollard, however, we get Face the Raven and this. It’s not that this is insufficient. Plenty  of other important Doctor Who writers exist with a similar paucity of stories: Ian Briggs, Stephen Wyatt, Philip Martin, Christopher Bailey, Stephen Gallagher, Robert Banks Stewart, Don Houghton, and Donald Cotton all turned in two stories and are clearly writers it’s both possible to draw a bead on and worth doing so. Even more exist in the new series, where two story writers are common. But Dollard feels extraordinary even within this company, which, let’s note, includes some of the finest writers to grace the series.

One big and obvious reason for this is that she is the first woman to feel like a major writer for televised Doctor Who. Obviously other women have written for the series, including Helen Raynor, Rona Munro, and Jane Baker as ones to have multiple credits. But neither Raynor nor Munro feel era-defining, while Jane Baker is, let’s say, not necessarily a positive model. Dollard is joined only by Kate Orman on the short list of women who have felt like era-defining figures in a remotely positive way. And in an era like the late 10s, when one of the most pressing issues facing Doctor Who and SF/F media in general is the need to foreground diverse voices, having Dollard as the first major woman writer of Doctor Who is an important thing to understand.

Let’s start with the obvious: if you want to be a major woman writer of Doctor Who, it helps to be Australian. Which is great news for Caitlin.…

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