It’s November 14th, 2021. Adele ain’t going anywhere on the charts. Neither is Ed Sheeran, but there’s also CKay, Glass Animals, and Arrdee. In news, Britney Spears is released from her conservatorship, a man detonates an IED outside the Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and Dominion Voting Systems sues Fox News for defamation around Donald Trump’s attempted coup.

On television, meanwhile, we have “Once, Upon Time,” an episode Chibnall’s co-executive producer Matt Strevens hyped to Doctor Who Magazine as “very ambitious” saying that “it credits the audience with sophistication and intelligence” whilst comparing it to the output of noted indie film studio A24. No, sorry, I’m kidding, he compares it to Marvel. That’s his actual example of ambitious storytelling—not even the competently upper middle brow stylings of A24, but the fucking Marvel Cinematic Universe. That’s intelligence and sophistication now—cynical IP farms that operate on the premise that everyone is basically just a fifteen year old boy.

Strevens was likely talking about WandaVision, the first show in this particular iteration of the “MCU on television” concept following Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on generic broadcast television and the Defenders suite on Netflix, both of which were memory-holed in favor of creating headliner content for Disney+, a streaming service we’ll have plenty of time to discuss later in life. That show opened with a trio of episodes dropped over two weeks that presented events in the form of cracked mirror historical sitcoms, starting with a 1950s I Love Lucy pastiche (complete with live studio audience) and moving up through the 1970s before finally revealing its proper conceit. This isn’t that far from “Once, Upon Time,” which sees Whittaker, Gill, and Bishop playing out an adventure that is eventually revealed to have really happened to the Jo Martin Doctor. That flutter of formalist play is neither especially ambitious nor anything like the norm for Marvel, but that’s neither here nor there, and while mocking Strevens for this is both easy and fun, it’s not especially revealing.

The more obvious point of comparison between Doctor Who and Marvel is Loki, which aired its first season just a few months prior to Flux. It’s not entirely fair to say that Loki is “Marvel tries to do Doctor Who,” but the inaccuracy is a matter of degree as opposed to a critique of the underlying association. Certainly Loki is Marvel doing a story about time travel with a mercurial lead who’s played by a British guy who can accurately be described as both “hot” and “a weird little guy.” Which, obviously, Doctor Who isn’t doing that last one in this period, but the point stands. Production on the first season was even disrupted by the pandemic, though Loki was filming in Atlanta under appreciably looser restrictions than a BBC production.

It will of course surprise nobody that Loki is appreciably better than Chibnall-era Doctor Who. It is made by people who can broadly be described as “knowing what they’re doing,” and so possesses things like character arcs and storylines that can accurately be described as being “about” things.…

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It’s November 7th, 2021. Adele is at number one with “Easy On Me.” Ed Sheeran, Ed Sheeran, and Ed Sheeran also chart. In news, a crowd crush at a Travis Scott concert killed ten, the House of Representatives passes an infrastructure bill designed largely to kill off more progressive bills from passing, and Owen Paterson resigns from Parliament after a report finding that he broke lobbying rules, although not before the Tories consider simply abandoning lobbying rules instead. Also, the phenomenally named Nimblewill Nomad becomes the oldest person to hike the Appalachian Trail.

I probably do some stuff too before grudgingly settling in to watch War of the Sontarans. But you know who it’s really interesting to imagine watching this? Russell T Davies. Really, it’s less this—you assume that, with Power of the Doctor in the can for several weeks, he’d been given pre-air copies of these episodes. You never know though—maybe Chibnall was just that spoilerphobic. By this point, though, Davies was already at work, dreaming of Meeps and Goblins. No, what’s interesting to imagine is Davies sitting down and watching Series 11 and 12 as a fan with no more idea than the rest of us that he’s the next showrunner.

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Davies—especially given that, despite calling it a Pop Between Realities post for the Capaldi era when I wrote it in 2015, I declined to actually run the essay I wrote on Cucumber/Banana/Tofu during the Capaldi Eruditorum, deeming it a bit too much of a review. But it’s notable that when the Chibnall era debuted that triptych of shows in 2015 and the three-episode A Very English Scandal earlier in 2018 were the only significant pieces of television writing Davies had done since the end of Torchwood.

The explanation for this is simple. In 2011, right in the midst of Miracle Day airing, his husband Andrew Smith was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer and given less than a year to live. Davies put all of his television work on hold and returned to Manchester to care for him. Cucumber was largely written—it had been developed as a BBC/Showtime co-production and was in the process of casting when Smith got sick and Davies pulled the plug. Piers Wegner got him to bring it to Channel 4, and it shot in Manchester.

At the end of September 2018, just over six years after his year to live, Smith passed. By this time Davies had already started his way back towards regular work—he’d made A Very English Scandal, and his next project, Years and Years, was on the brink of starting shooting. But before that, just over a week after Smith’s death, came The Woman Who Fell to Earth.

As I said, it’s worth imagining Davies watching these episodes. It’s implausible to imagine he didn’t recognize that Chibnall was fucking it up. This is a man who obsesses over how sets for people’s houses should have crap sitting on the staircases to look more lived in.…

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It’s October 31st, 2021. Adele is at number one with “Easy on Me.” Ed Sheeran, Elton John and Dua Lipa, Coldplay and BTS, and Lil Nas X also chart. In news, well, there’s ten fucking months of it. Failed coup in the US, successful one in Myanmar, the Ever Given running aground, Discovery acquiring Warner Brothers, Netanyahu briefly losing power in Israel, wildfires, heat waves, winter storms. The usual.

The real story, at least in terms of the qualia of being alive, is the slow lurching of the world towards approximated normality. COVID, of course, never goes away. It’s just a new illness we live with and that kills and disables people in large and horrifying quantities forever. But vaccination picks up speed and things start to reopen. Penn, Anna, and I take a trip to Chicago in September to go to nice restaurants for the first time in over a year. As is by now usual, my wife declines to join us. On the day that we’re heading home, my Twitter lights up with the news that Russell T Davies is returning to Doctor Who. I subsequently spend every rest stop along the twelve hour drive dealing with what is, effectively, being unexpectedly called into work.

One of the first decisions that I make based on the knowledge is that I’m going to write a Whittaker era Eruditorum. This had been largely up in the air—my stated position was that I’d only do it if some subsequent era made me want to write about the show in depth again. But the return of Davies was if nothing else sure to be interesting, and so I decided I’d do it.

I forget who watches this one with me. I think it might have been just Penn. (I eventually, writing these essays, just stopped telling him I was going to watch things so he’d stop doing this to himself.) Anticipating the fact that by this point in Eruditorum I would be struggling to find things to say, I only offered a capsule review on Patreon. I forget the exact text, and bothering to find it would probably take a solid 10-15% of the amount of time I spent on it in the first place, but the basic structure was that I described this as the “best Chibnall episode ever” because all it had to do was write checks that other episodes would fail to cash.

Which is to say that at this point, you just feel bad for the poor show. If The Timeless Children was Chris Chibnall being haunted by the vengeful spirits of Pip and Jane, here we see him pulling the same feat as John Nathan-Turner as he dragged Trial of a Time Lord through production despite the dramatic flouncing of the script editor, death of the writer mid-finale, and the fact that the show had literally just been cancelled. In both cases the result is a sort of heroic triumph of getting extremely bad television to air on BBC One and get coverage in mainstream newspapers.…

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It’s January 1st, 2021. Wham is at number one with “Last Christmas.” Mariah Carey, Band Aid, Elton John, and the Pogues featuring Kirsty Maccoll also chart. In news… well, there’s been a bit. Obviously we’ve already talked about the pandemic. But we haven’t talked about the 350,000 confirmed COVID deaths in the US, or the 72,000 in the UK—a full 1% of the population in each country. Nor have we talked about the appalling response in each country, from bleach injections to Eat Out to Help Out. There’s Keir Starmer becoming leader of the Labour Party. There’s Ruth Bader Ginsberg dying and being replaced by Amy Comey Barrett. There’s the Arecibo Telescope collapsing.

And then, of course, there’s the election. The agonizingly slow motion battle between the ongoing collapse into fascism under Trump and the bland inadequacy of centrist liberalism. With passport issuance fucked by the pandemic, the situation is alarming enough that our family decides to become gun owners. Ultimately the not as evil guys win, and it feels like more relief than it should. I remember when the last couple of states were properly called—it was an unseasonably warm day for November, and I was downtown on the Ithaca Commons, which felt effervescent in a way it hadn’t all pandemic. But, of course, that still rolled into the unsettling two month period of Trump’s attempted coup. By the new year it was largely clear that Biden would successfully take office, but the uncertainty remained, hanging over everything, as would become especially clear just five days after this aired.

Mostly, life lumbered on. We decided to officially adopt Christine. I finally dusted off Last War in Albion and tore through writing the rest of Volume 2. Vaccines came out; I think by New Year’s my wife, who was in the first wave as a nurse, had her first dose but not her second. To the extent that there was an end—and that’s a complicated notion to be sure—it was in sight.

And then there was Doctor Who. Much like the music charts, Revolution of the Daleks felt out of time. It’s not just the absurd return to 80s-style naming, turning to the title that literally everyone had thought of in spite of the complete lack of actual revolution in the story. (To be fair, previous stories contained at best dubious quantities of resurrection, revelation, or remembrance.) Nor is it the presence of a Theresa May stand-in a year and a half after Boris Johnson took office—a fact that’s even more puzzling when you consider that this was shot in November 2019, four months after May’s resignation. No, at the end of the day it’s more fundamental than that—the fact that this is picking up on a nearly year-old cliffhanger in which the year in question was 2020.

Three years on it seems even more dated, what with both actors involved in its puzzling decision to feature two separate returning characters named Jack becoming uncastable over the course of the next year.…

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