It was not what I expected, which remains inherently high praise for Doctor Who. Part of this was deliberate misdirection. Our eponymous character was previewed as menacing, the post-Ruby Road trailer painting him as a traitor. What we get is him hovering over everything until he’s deployed out of nowhere to defuse Face the Raven in miniature and allow the episode to have no finale set-up whatsoever. It’s sly. Roguish even. As the first script since The Haunting of Villa Diodati to be written by someone who did not write for Series Three in 2007, which is a problem, it makes a charming impression. Certainly it makes you wish Kate Herron had done more than just direct Loki. 

It’s anchored by a phenomenal cast—a fact it establishes by the four minute mark, with a one-two reveal of Indira Varma and Jonathan Groff, a duo prestige dramas from the days of HBO Go would have cut your throat for. Varma’s delivery of “a very difficult cheese” is a four course meal’s worth of old school Doctor Who acting from the days of KERA 13, where Jonathan Groff has blissfully never seen the work of Philip Madoc or Kate O’Mara and so comes to “can you do Captain Jack with less sexual harassment” pleasantly fresh. Gatwa, meanwhile, remains firmly from the days of Disney+, and is given acres of space to do it. 

“Acres of space” describes it in a lot of ways, in fact. Malevolent space cosplayers is an absolutely phenomenal conceit for a monster of the week—a genre in which we’ve not even had a sincere contender since, what, the Mire? They’ve even got a good name. But they’re a complex premise as these things go, and the episode wisely paces itself around that fact. The effect is to let everyone just vibe in their Bridgerton riffs. The way in which Gatwa is on Doctor Who Unleashed absolutely cackling at his chemistry with Jonathan Groff suggests quite a lot of fun was had with it. 

I keep coming back to that word. Fun is not my favorite concept, which I recognize is a me problem, but it’s nice to have it. Certainly it’s nice to see it had with such confidence. Bridgerton, notably, helped push Boom down to a season low 18th in the ratings with its four episode drop, half of which edged it out. Issuing a response episode in three weeks rivals “Meet the Grahams” in ruthless efficiency. This is stylish and knows it. 

As a viewer with fun issues who’s not actually seen Bridgerton I’m not quite its target audience.  I’m still too fussed on earning your emotional beats—selling the Doctor/Rogue romance better, instead of just bluntly tropesing in. But this is, again, a me problem at this point. This is plainly a show that’s got mojo. 

Let’s return to that notion of expectations. This was the episode I was looking forward to least on the whole. It had midseason filler written all over it.…

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Nothing about this should work. Off the bat, it’s sandbagged by being a second Doctor-lite episode in a row. And for those terminally irked by Space Babies—and I’m certainly at all curious how that’s going to do in the rewatch—this displays nearly all the tendencies that, if not why the episode was bad, at least very much set it up to fail. Which is to say, this is Russell T Davies in his always controversial farting aliens mode, to the point of featuring a character named Dr. Pee. Indeed, nearly every proper noun save “Gothic Paul” designed to be annoying. On top of that it features a sixty-one year old man writing about the evils of social media, taking to nuanced satire is like a backhoe to gardening. Its main conceit is a social media bubble that literally prevents people from seeing what’s right in front of them, its main character unable to even walk without her device’s assistance. And then, after forty minutes of this, Russell T Davies decides that he should probably address racism.

The most obvious thing to say, right off the bat, is that Gatwa makes this, effortlessly shifting gears through the Doctor’s increasing desperation before going off into an actorial guitar solo of gesture and expression. First the shocked horror, then the hysterical laughter, and then that awful, brilliant break into screaming before a lingering, tearful judgment that slowly hardens into contempt. It’s astonishing work, and it has to be—anything less than a standout moment to make every critic carve out a paragraph of heavy praise is going to sink the whole endeavor. That would be true even without the goofball antics of the first 95% of the episode. 

But there’s something innately off about crediting the success of a Doctor-lite episode exclusively to the Doctor. Yes, this one makes sly use of its premise—Gatwa’s actually in an awful lot of it because you can shoot stupidly fast with a single camera angle and no set to speak of. But that’s just another reason to praise Davies, who turns in what is broadly speaking the episode everybody wanted from him when his return was announced.

The farting alien mode had, of course, already been perfected once, in the second most obvious antecedent to this, Gridlock. This is Davies building on that success. For all his satire is broad, it’s never careless. The Bubble is clever, both in its wordplay and as a visual concept, affordable now, as opposed to when Davies pitched this to Moffat. More to the point, it’s just conceptually sharp. There’s a ton of idle depth—acres of character work threaded through little details like follower counts and the little messages on people’s profiles.

But Davies also expands on the weird bleakness at the core of Gridlock, not just with the same “they’re all dead” reveal, but with an aggressive juxtaposition of the pastel-laden 60s retro-future vibe and the properly tense horror stretches. All of this sets up his final moment—that smash cut tonal whiplash from farting aliens to the nihilist Davies of Midnight and Children of Earth.…

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There’s a lot here that’s fantastic. The first eighteen minutes—the bit where we burn through the trailed premise—are delightful. Using Susan Twist and the audience’s broad knowledge that she’s arc-relevant in order to quietly sell the threat of the mysterious woman is shrewd. The entire pub scene, with its unsettling close-ups quietly ratcheting up tension before its cheeky balloon puncture of a resolution, is a great little set piece. And then the episode’s sudden lurching pace throws everything off-kilter in compelling ways. Carla going bad is just as chilling as it was in The Church on Ruby Road—doubly so after we’ve gotten to briefly (and charmingly) see her play at being a Doctor Who character by trying to solve things and successfully identify the Doctor as pottering in his shed. Jemma Redgrave has never been used better, getting to be charming and mysterious instead of just sort of chronically alarmed. (The detail of her knowing there’s something’s gone weird with time is quite a nice show of confidence.) And Millie Gibson, left to spend her first weeks on the program on a Doctor-lite episode because Ncuti Gatwa wasn’t done on Sex Education, pulls it off with brash aplomb. 

But it just doesn’t work. It’s tempting to say that the problem is yet another rushed ending that isn’t quite earned. But this broadly is earned. Ruby’s already defeated Mad Jack, in a very nice and clever bit of thinking. We’ve seen her learn things within the time jumps enough times that her figuring out the mystery feels sensible. All of the technical nuts and bolts are actually here this time, at least in terms of the dramaturgy. No, what’s lacking is, worrisomely, the same thing that was lacking in The Devil’s Chord—a sense that the fantastic conceits of this episode aren’t actually thought through.

I’m not bothered by the time loop not getting fleshed out. We’ve all seen time loops in Doctor Who. But what actually sends Ruby back across her timeline to warn herself? Why does the result of that hover 73 yards away from her? Like, I get that she’s been smeared across her own timeline—that makes sense. But with so much made of her precise distance and the fact that she can’t visually be resolved into anything other than a distance-blurred image of herself, and yet this isn’t actually a remotely logical extension of what seems to be happening. For that matter, why does she have a fear effect? I mean, shit, why does the Doctor disappear in the first place? It’s all just an arbitrary set of rules warranted on nothing save for the poetry of circular storytelling.

Likewise, what is Mad Jack? Sure, yes, some nameless horror bound within a faerie circle. You don’t need to explain that any more than you do a time loop. But that’s all he is. The Albion Party and his rise to power feel like Davies taking the weakest part of Years and Years—its actual engagement with its conceit of a fascist rise to power in Britain—and going “maybe if I did it even more sloppily.”…

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The classics are classics for a reason, and there’s little more classic than letting Moffat run rampant on some formalist bullshit. The question, really, was which Moffat we were going to get. The most obvious comparison is of course Heaven Sent, and yes—this is absolutely Doctor Who made by the guy who did Heaven Sent, with all the imperious bravado that suggests. Put him on the new Doctor and let the series show off for its second week. It’s a sound strategy.

But it’s also not the whole story. For one thing, Moffat seems to have reverted to his Last Vow and Beast Below mode of spitting venom. Davies’ episodes to date have simmered with anger, but Moffat unleashes it fully. Boom never elevates into anything like a coherent critique—its reveal of algorithmic warfare against nobody in order to sell more war is clever without ever being pointed. Still, for all it’s “old man yells at cloud storage” nature, it’s easy to like. It’s damn near the ideal case for what we could have gotten out of Moffat, at least from the perspective I tend to hold.

There’s a third aspect here though, in the chaotic jumble that is the ending. Last week I compared the not quite baked denouement to Series 7 Moffat, when his narrative acceleration got out of control. And that’s in play here, with an ending that’s less concerned with earning itself than it is with ricocheting through the concept’s extremes. This could, obviously, be a problem. Arguably it is—I don’t think many people are going to call this Moffat’s greatest triumph, and that’s probably mostly down to its slightly stumbling ending.

Equally, Series 7 Moffat always felt like Moffat drifting out of focus. In an unhappy production situation he ground out television that felt half-baked. Whereas in the wake of six episodes worth of neo-Davies, it’s clearly a conscious choice that’s quite in keeping with last episode’s somewhat dubious relationship with resolution. If this is anything, it’s the Moffat of Heaven Sent having seen (or at least read) The Giggle. Whether it’s a successful choice will to a real extent be up to people other than middle-aged media critics. Rules and storytelling conventions shift, and if Moffat got out ahead of himself a decade ago, that says very little about now. If this is a hit then playing it this loose will be vindicated. If it stumbles, there’ll be plenty to Monday morning quarterback about. 

For my part… I mean, I basically liked Series 7 and was quite charmed by The Giggle.  Yeah, the former was the nadir of the Moffat era, but the reality is that the nadir of the Moffat era is still more likely to get a rewatch out of me than half of the RTD1 era, to say nothing of Chibnall. As for the latter, while its legacy is very much being discovered, it remains extraordinarily fun in the moment. 

The pleasures, then. Gatwa, obviously. Faced with “hey can you do Heaven Sent” in his third production block, as a fun challenge to follow up his first season premiere, he does his fellow Scotsman proud.…

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Now that’s something I haven’t seen before.

What is perhaps most impressive is the way in which it drops the hammer and simply never lets up. Once Jinx Monsoon crawls out of the piano the show simply works this way now. It does not worry about whether anyone will be confused by the fact that it works this way now. It just does. The universe is menaced by the Gods of Faggotry, the Doctor can hear non-diegetic music, and there’s always a twist at the end. It’s a gorgeous one-two punch with Space Babies, completing a magic trick in which, Doctor Who transforms before our eyes from a 2008 nostalgia piece into something startlingly unfamiliar, all in the space of Flux.

Let’s harp on the flaws, just to give a win to the people who are annoyed that I actually like the show. There’s a frustrating nothingness to the resolution. I mean, really, that stuttering ending, with its repeated promise of a twist and we don’t even go back to Susan, whether Foreman or Twist? The villain being defeated because Paul McCartney and John Lennon happen to walk down a hallway, such that the Doctor and Ruby are basically bystanders? This is the closest Doctor Who has been to functioning on pure spectacle since The Claws of Axos.

But come on. To paraphrase Ncuti Gatwa himself, The Claws of Axos fucks. This is absolutely bonkers fun. A tremendous amount of credit for that is down to Jinkx Monsoon, who effortlessly outpaces Graham Crowden himself in percentage of story spent at eleven. She takes the firm foundation laid by Neil Patrick Harris and stretches it to its absolute limits to produce the most memorable villain performance since Michelle Gomez. But as a performance, it’s well-tailored to Gatwa’s Doctor. Never before have we had a Doctor whose core strength is that he’s exquisitely good at melodrama. His performance lingers in the extremes of emotion. He does not so much swing between them as flicker—a series of maximalist emotings executed with devastating charisma. It evokes Nicolas Cage in its mindful dismissal of naturalism, and the result feels breathtakingly fresh.

The short straw in all of this goes to Millie Gibson, who has little to do but keep up. She doubtless fares slightly better among the roughly 100% of the audience who don’t look at her showpiece section of the episode and go “oh, we’re redoing Pyramids of Mars,” and actually does that bit quite well, but for most of the episode’s runtime she’s stuck being the one person who isn’t allowed to be maximalist. But even she plays a weak hand well.

I compared Space Babies to Rose, and it’s similarly helpful to compare this to The End of the World. In both cases the show is stressing how weird it can be. But as with Space Babies, there’s a sense of throwing caution to the wind. The End of the World was concerned with making sure the audience would accept its grinning excesses.…

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First off, a note on how I did these, given the oddness of the release structure. I’ve just come upstairs from watching Space Babies, and I’m writing this main section and putting it up on Patreon. Then I’m going to go watch The Devil’s Chord, and do the same for it. After that I’ll fill in bullet points on each, and see what’s going on with the Patreon level and whether these go on the main site yet. 

There was a trend among the reviews that started popping up last week where they suggested Space Babies was a pretty by the numbers Russell T Davies story, and that things got more interesting with The Devil’s Chord. And you can see what they meant right away. Nothing in this is surprising, at least to people who have seen any Doctor Who. It’s not as strictly RTD-by-numbers as those reviews suggest—there’s a lot of Moffat in here. But it’s immensely standard. The uncharitable thing to say is that it probably is going to benefit from having a second episode released alongside it, and it might even be true. It certainly falls short of my usual standard from Doctor Who that I want it to show me something I haven’t seen before.

But that’s probably the professional Doctor Who nerd in me talking. This is making the same basic move as The Star Beast, catering to a UK terrestrial audience with a “look, it’s Doctor Who, that thing you like” episode. If it’s over-cautious, it’s at least deliberate in that. And you can see why they thought it might be a good idea. It’s a showcase for Gatwa and Gibson—forty-five minutes of trad set pieces to let them demonstrate their specific flavor of charisma. And more to the point, even though it’s their fourth episode together from a filming perspective, it’s an opportunity for Gatwa and Gibson to put their stamp on those basics. One of the standard things chefs are asked to do in job interviews is to make an omelet, because an omelet is an effective test of a lot of fundamental kitchen skills. This is much the same.

Gatwa and Gibson, at least, prove solid cooks. There’s a fizz to their charisma—a ricocheting energy as they amp each other up. Gatwa described the dynamic as best friends who love getting in trouble together, and it’s spot on. The middle of the episode runs largely on the quality of the eponymous visual, and much of what sells the bonkers charm of space babies is just how much fun the Doctor and Ruby seem to be having with the concept. And when the third act begins a chain of rapid reveals, they similarly sell each a-ha with a breathless urgency, so that the plot tumbles giddily through its explanation. This is clearly going to be fun.

Where things stumble is the first quarter, labored as it is with “explain the lore for all those Americans on Disney+.” Gatwa and Gibson’s energy is enough to keep it out of trouble, but you find yourself thinking that maybe “two hearts” could have been saved for later in the season.…

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32.

Eight years into the throbbing agony of anticlimactic eschatology, it is perhaps time to reflect on what we’ve learned. First, let us consider QAnon, which I’ll use as a metonym for the larger phenomenon of conspiratorial fascism. Jeff Sharlet has observed that the actual discursive practice of QAnon is fundamentally gnostic in structure and approach—all hidden and implicit truths that must be individually discovered through the meditational contemplation of endless YouTube videos.

This is not surprising—what other form would the intellectual discourse of a nihilistic Ruined Modernism take? For that matter, what other form would an intellectual discourse based on wall to wall falsehoods take? For all the alarm and panic about pervasive misinformation, the fact, as hundreds of thousands of dead COVID truthers can’t actually attest, is that material reality eventually asserts itself. And so of course the intellectual discourse surrounding a mendaciously narcissistic avatar of the twentieth century’s death drive is fundamentally gnostic. No epistemology short of the complete rejection of reality could possibly stay aloft in these circumstances.

All the same, there are core beliefs organizing the apophenic free play—racism and homophobia, for instance. But the biggest anchoring principle within all of it is an absolute and unwavering belief in the man himself. This does not simply extend to the comprehensive writing off of any and all actual bad actions, from grabbing them by the pussy to staging a coup, but to borderline—even outright—deification. This is not an ontological truth per se—there’ve been moments, must sustainedly around COVID vaccines, in which his hold threatened to slip. But it is an ongoing practical truth.

It is in some ways helpful to consider all of this—gnostic ideological forces, warm and sycophantic bodies, vast capital expenditures, and, of course, the rotting void around which they orbit—as a single entity infecting the body politic. In my previous work I focused on the hollowed chasm of the man himself, suggesting that he had offered up his name in what I colorfully referred to as an “architectural black mass” to become a creature of pure image. In many ways this gestalt is the result of that—the creature that his eaten name became. Let us call it Trump, then.

On an ideological level, Trump is simple. When I say ideology, to be clear, I don’t mean the gnostic conspiracy theories that constitute its discourse. Trump is, after all, a creature of reckless falsehoods, and its propaganda, even if sincerely believed by its foot soldiers, does not constitute its actual ideology. Its ideology is far blunter—a crude lust for power, which is in turn conceptualized in binary terms of winners and losers and the former’s blunt domination of the latter. This often has the characteristics of outright sadism, but this is better thought of as a low energy state for Trump as opposed to an intrinsic dimension of it.

The more interesting question is how Trump operates. Here it is useful to consider an anecdote about the man. Back in 1996, he attended a gala for an AIDS charity.…

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As with most things I find myself liking while everyone else is at best, like my daughter, conflicted, I find myself starting from what the question of what the film thinks it’s doing. The beginning is instructive here. We start in an uncomfortable close-up on Nick Offerman’s nameless President. He is strangely awkward and tentative as he works his way through describing a military victory. Gradually, however, his delivery grows firmer and more confident until it attains a swaggering, brusque confidence. Eventually the scene switches, and we are looking at the President on television, now delivering his remarks in a suitably statesmanlake cadence. Our view expands, and we see a haggard Kirsten Dunst in a hotel room at night as explosions rock the cityscape outside her large glass windows. She carries a camera, which she raises to her eye, pointing it at the President on the TV screen, lining up her shot. Click.

Which is to say that this is a film about the production of the image. This fact frames most decisions the film makes—certainly its choice of protagonists, with the two leads both being war photographers, one of them working a pointedly analog setup of an SLR camera and portable developing kit just to highlight the root mediality of this. As Christine notes, the film makes savvy use of this, alternating between fast-moving, tense action sequences and still photographs, sound cutting in and out to emphasize the contrast between event and image. Even its structure as a travelogue of a journey from New York to Washington pushes it towards a disconnected series of images.

This provides crucial context for what is proving the most controversial aspect of the film: its willful disinterest in the actual politics of the titular civil war. The primary rebellion is the “Western Forces,” an alliance between California and Texas that deliberately cuts across the lines most likely to divide an actual American civil war in the near future. Even within that, there’s little clear sense of who, exactly, is doing what. The film’s tensest sequence, in which the characters are menaced by Jesse Plemons, who demands to know where they’re from and shoots the characters born outside of the US, never actually identifies what side he fights for. The other most intriguing characters, a pair of rainbow-haired soldiers pinned down by a sniper, ostentatiously refuse to disclose what side they’re on. Offerman’s President reveals no political positions save for autocracy.

The absurdity of this defiant effort to produce an apolitical film about an American civil war has proven vexing for critics. Even those willing to grant the notion of apolitical art—and I’m on record rejecting the possibility entirely—are struck by the impossibility of this task. Garland, who is not an idiot, can surely see it as well. But the quixotic attempt serves the same purpose as those sonic cuts, highlighting the act of representation, making us aware that we are looking not at an American civil war but the image of one.

In this regard what Christine highlights as the film’s strength—its repeated arrival at chilling, harrowing images—is the whole of its point.…

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