It’s February 23, 2020. Billie Eilish is at number one with “No Time to Die.” The Weeknd, Lewis Capaldi, and Justin Bieber also chart. In news, Bernie Sanders continues his apparent romp towards the Democratic nomination by winning Nevada, while the plastic £20 note enters circulation. COVID plods along in the background, a slow moving catastrophe that somehow still doesn’t feel real. At Penn and Anna’s, we watch Ascension of the Cybermen, a dutiful but hollow rendition of what you might call standard issue Doctor Who season finale. It’s fine. The ending is stupid and obvious, and the Ireland stuff is weird, but mostly it’s the sort of boringness you expect from the Chibnall era.
A week later The Weeknd is back on top, Biden’s triumphant victory in South Carolina has turned the race on its head, and COVID is just starting to tip into its “cancel everything” phase. We’ve begun the process of packing, and Penn and I watch the season finale. And suddenly, I understand how Jan Vincent-Rudzki felt.
I want to tarry in that space for a minute, because the emotion is so vivid. Doctor Who annoys and disappoints me frequently, and at times I hate it, but this is the first time it has ever made me angry. It’s positively indecorous. I remember going off on a fan on Twitter—one I’d previously gotten on with, and who I think still gets on with Jack and some of the other people around the site—when they make a crowing post in support of the episode that takes time to revel in the misery of Moffat fans. I forget what I say. I’m sure “go fuck yourself” is involved. It may well be worse. Certainly it’s bad enough to be embarrassing. And yet it’s also entirely honest to the raw emotion of the moment. It feels stupid to be this angry about a TV show—even one I’ve tied myself to so completely. But I am.
Really, though, everything about this feels stupid. Three and a half years on, it’s still difficult to quite understand how it happened. No, Chibnall had never been good, but there’s an ocean of distance between Spyfall, which is recognizably doing a bad job at something that at least makes abstract sense to attempt, and The Timeless Children. Here we’re left to try to ascertain just what’s worse—the underlying idea or the execution.
We’ve talked a lot about the basic incompetence of the Chibnall era at this point, and so there’s relatively little new to talk about here. You’ve got Ko Sharmus, whose only real claim to having anything resembling the narrative weight he’s given is that he’s played by a third tier Game of Thrones actor. You’ve got Jo Martin coming back to play Magical Black Lady. And then, of course, you’ve got the fact that the main plot of The Timeless Children is literally the Master tying the Doctor up and explaining his wild new fan theory about the Morbius Doctors to her, a decision that is so comprehensively and stupidly ill-considered that it feels like you’re just being trolled—that this must be some sort of cruel joke Chibnall is unleashing on the world in a fit of Joker-like nihilism and desire to watch it all burn.…
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