It’s January 12^th, 2020. Stormzy, Ed Sheeran, and Burna Boy are at number one with “Own It,” while Lewis Capaldi, Dua Lipa, Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, and The Weeknd also chart. The family has been busy—we’d spent the late fall looking for a place to rent for all four of us, and in the early weeks of 2020 secure it and work on signing a lease, with a move-in date at the beginning of April. Life’s a busy blur of social engagements and planning, and Doctor Who is little more than my career obligation—the thing I have to find space on Sundays to deal with. In this case, it happens at Skulls, where the only television space involves us pulling kitchen chairs into a small bedroom if we want to get four people to watch it. We do so this week. Nobody enjoys it.

And of course, why should they? To say that this episode appears to have production problems is an understatement. It’s the ultimate “Chaos in Cardiff” production, such a self-evident shambles that they blatantly did not actually have the monster costumes on set for the bulk of it, having to shoot the bulk of confrontations with them as a shot-reverse-shot with the reverse just being a flash of a couple of them hissing in a dark room. It’s embarrassing like Underworld or Timelash is embarrassing—a colossal basic failure of television production. Which is, of course, no surprise. Like we said, last week all meaning collapsed as the show simply went into a long term nervous breakdown. 

This week, then, it’s not even much of a surprise when time itself breaks. That is, ultimately, the only way to understand this episode. The fact that this cannot easily be reconciled with The Mysterious Planet (an episode that, being a corrupted Matrix visualization, arguably has no inherent continuity implications in the first place) is easy enough to get around given that the Doctor explicitly declares this to only be one possible future. The problem is just that, well, the Doctor explicitly declares this to only be one possible future.

It’s not, obviously, that the idea of possible futures is new to Doctor Who. Time can famously be rewritten, and Kill the Moon explicitly introduced the idea that seemingly major events in history and future history were explicitly unfixed points. Nevertheless, the idea that there is a relatively singular timeline has clearly been the default. There are multiple instances in which the TARDIS has repeatedly visited broadly coherent notions of the future, including instances that span vast stretches of the Doctor’s subjective timeline. Put simply, if the sort of relationship with the future that Orphan 55 is suggesting were in play, it would be much more remarkable that the Doctor should encounter Alpha Centauri in both The Curse of Peladon and The Empress of Mars than the Doctor ever suggests. The timeline clearly has comparatively malleable bits, and you can certainly argue that it’s undergone massive revision over time, but there’s still generally supposed to be one of it.…

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It’s January 1st, 2020. Ellie Goulding is at number one with “River,” and the charts are otherwise hilariously unchanged from the last ones we talked about. In the year since Resolution, it’s been a pretty sizable upheaval in my life. A few days after it aired, I drove down to Virginia to pick up a reader of mine who rather direly needed to escape her abusive home and helped her transfer to the community college outside of Ithaca where I was working. By the time the Chibnall era is over, I’ll have adopted her. 

A few months later, after a particularly nice visit to see my boyfriend Penn in Boston, he and his wife Anna decided to move to Ithaca and form a four person poly family with my then-wife. They moved down at the beginning of July, by which point I’d decided to quit my community college job on the back of a successful push to increase my Patreon funding so that I can afford to go back to writing full time. This began a period in which I am effectively living in two houses, split between the apartment my then-wife and I already had, called within the polycule the Cave of Skulls, and the one that Anna and Penn are renting, called Tree House. 

New Year’s Eve is spent at a pleasant if last minute party at a friend’s house that, in hindsight, will turn out to be the last real time the stable social circle that I’d enjoyed for a few years in Ithaca all hung out. Waking up the next day, the big question looming over my New Year’s Day is the fact that there’s a new Doctor Who to watch, and more to the point the fact that my Patreon is currently below the admittedly ambitious threshold I set to review it.

I’ve made a New Year’s Resolution to watch a hundred movies in 2020—I fail—but I get started with Knives Out at the local Regal in the dying mall, and it’s as we’re heading into the theater that I get the ping that my Patreon has gone high enough at the last minute, I’ll have to actually watch and review/podcast about Spyfall Part 1 when I get home. So we head back to Trees, pull up the new episode, and I have a look.

Let’s start with the first, oh, nine minutes or so, because they’re actually pretty good. We get a nice, tight cold open of some monster kills that bustles with all the international sweep that slapping location captions over stock footage and shots of Cardiff can muster. Then we have credits, and, in a nice cheeky bit of flag planting, an identical caption for Sheffield that puts it on the same level as the locations we’d been touring a minute before. Here we get a quick reintroduction to the core cast, doing an efficient “how their lives have changed traveling with the Doctor” sequence for each before having them picked up by mysterious men in black, as, finally, is the Doctor.…

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For once, then, the spinoff media feel like a plausible hope of quality. Of course, they exited the Moffat era in dire shape. Big Finish’s failures scarcely neet further elaboration, while the novel line spent a decade in gradual decline under the stewardship of the same guy who’d been editor for The Ancestor Cell. This meant that we were never going to see some Whittaker Era in Exile that offered a credible double to the main era. But it didn’t preclude outbreaks of quality. This was, after all, the line that had previously hired Michael Moorcock and Stephen Baxter. Good things could still happen.

And certainly the hiring of Juno Dawson qualifies. A successful young adult writer who penned This Book is Gay to the outrage of the good homophobes of Wasilla, Alaska before publicly transitioning. She is, in other words, the sort of author you’d actually expect a healthy Doctor Who novels line to commission: a reasonably hot writer who’s a big enough fan to be amused by the opportunity. (Dawson offers fond childhood memories of Time and the Rani, which is one of the most delightfully idiosyncratic versions of that anecdote as Doctor Who writers go.) This book was an unequivocal good sign in a year that had plenty of bad ones.

Because quality is an annoyingly foregrounded issue in this era, we may as well establish up front that this is pretty good. Dawson gets how to do this. The Good Doctor sits up there with Demons of the Punjab and, more cursedly, Kerblam! in actually providing a notion of how this could ever have worked. Which is a key piece of work for the long run accomplished. When some idiot in twenty or thirty years decides there’s room to do another big sprawling Doctor Who overview, The Good Doctor will play a key role in establishing the dissident “good” version of the Thirteenth Doctor era that got reconstructed in hindsight.

But that’s going to require hindsight. At the time of writing—early March, 2023 for the first draft of this—the Thirteenth Doctor era still stands out for having the absolute lowest number of decent stories of literally any era of Doctor Who. In part this is because of the dearth of spinoff material—there’s only a handful of other Thirteenth Doctor books besides this one, as once Richards retired from managing the line it largely withered, and so the era is still entirely dependent on the televised version, in much the same way that your only real options for non-televised Colin Baker stories in 1987 were Slipback and the Doctor Who Magazine comic. So while there clearly is a working model of Whittaker’s Doctor to concoct out of this, that doesn’t at present actually constitute a generally functional Whittaker era in the same way that early Big Finish did for Colin Baker.

So how did Dawson accomplish this? Well, the cynical and not entirely satisfying answer is that she did it by simply inventing the era from scratch.…

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