Is anyone still watching? I gave up during last season, tuned in for Resolution which I hated, and hadn't watched this year until a degree of internet hype and being at a loose end meant that I caught the last 45-50 minutes of Fugitive of the Judoon. It seems to have been very well received, if the people who appear on my Twitter timeline are anything to go by, but I thought it was the worst episode of scripted television I have seen in my 55 years on Earth. Devoid of plot, it consisted of boring characters, badly acted, delivering long, boring dialogue scenes about nothing. In place of plot - and the things that made people who go "squea!" go "squea!" - we got a badly-written cameo from Captain Jack who was popular when talented writers wrote his part, some foreshadowing, and a MASSIVE TWIST IN DOCTOR WHO CONTINUITY ... the sort of thing that RTD or the Moff could build to and make you sit up and take notice but Chibnall is a lazy hack so we get lazy hackery. In fact, the "twist" is pretty much ripped off from the episode Utopia where Derek Jacobi is hiding in plain sight as the Master, only in this case we get some actress called Jo Martin of whom I had never heard (and, going by her performance, I would have been happy never to have heard of again) turning out to be ... The Doctor? We've already had The Next Doctor and the big reveal of John Hurt as the War Doctor so this, once again, felt like Chibnall lazily rehashing stuff that better writers had already done much better except that he now seems to have free rein to mess with the show's history. There's a spoiler going round about how this will all impact on the character of the Doctor and the person who relayed it has been spot on with their spoilers about the series so far. It sounds ghastly and might even stop me returning to the show even after Chibs leaves.
top of page
bottom of page
For me, it’s just that Doctor Who seems to have settled into a rut – a bit like the mid-1980s, it’s not particularly good, or bad, it’s just sort of there. Chibnall seems to lack the sort of vision / shameless self-confidence which is needed to make DW talked about in the playgrounds and offices of the UK. RTD, for all his perceived faults, is an expert showman, who made TV which was hugely popular with the general audience as well as the anoraks. Moffat less so, and definitely a better occasional scripter than show-runner, if the stories of the internal upheavals and personal spats during his time are to be believed. Even he could pull something out of the hat which reminded you of how good he could be when he was on form – the last occasion being that Cybermen two-parter which wrapped up the Capaldi era – it brought back the cloth-faced original Cybermen with all their body-horror implications, and didn’t screw it up. It finished off the Master / Missy redemption arc with a twist, and even made Simm-Master bearable, as opposed to the gurning loon of the Tennant years.
The “big” revelations of the end of the latest season left me cold, mainly because of the way they were handled, but also because they’ve muddied the waters of continuity unnecessarily. If Chibbers doesn’t want the Time Lords in his show, then why not just forget them, instead of having the Master kill them all / turn them into crap looking Cyber-Lords or whatever offscreen (and just how did he manage to destroy the entire race and wreck the Capitol single-handed? Skellybones Master in The Deadly Assassin came closest in the past, and even he had a few helpers.) Between 1969 when they were introduced, and 1989, Time Lords appeared in a grand total of nine stories over the twenty years… and that’s including the handful of occasions where just one or two briefly appeared to send the Doctor on a mission. For great clumps of stories, they weren’t a presence, or even mentioned. Also, killing the entire race in a fit of pique just because he finds out that the Doctor is more important that he is… that’s a little OTT, even for the Master. In The Claws of Axos when the Doctor suggests an alliance with Axos to destroy the Time Lords, the Master’s visibly shocked, and wants no part of it. This new chap seems to be more in the whacky Simm mode though, with a bit more of Timothy Claypole from Rentaghost in the character than there is of Roger Delgado.
Jodie Whittaker’s fine as the Doctor, though it’s interesting that the production team seem to be largely ignoring the implications of change in gender – a case in point, her costume, apart from making her look like a CBeebies presenter, also seems designed with the intention of making an attractive woman (in my opinion, your mileage may vary,) look totally sexless. The only reference we’ve had as such was in the Villa Diodati story where it’s evident that Lord Byron (notorious historical shagger that he was) lusts after her. In the first episode of this season, instead of glamming up to go to Lenny Henry’s party, she’s landed with an oversized tuxedo which made her look like a kid playing dress-up.
The Timeless Child stuff slightly annoyed me, not because of the canon-busting implications of the revelation, but because of the way it was done – almost entirely told to a passive, captive Doctor by the Master (who’s an unreliable source if ever there was one, should a new showrunner wish to undo all this.) I just can’t shake the feeling that Chibnell did it solely because those eight pre-Hartnell Doctors glimpsed in The Brain of Morbius had been bothering him since 1975. On a purely practical level, it does seem to mean that they can now cast any old bugger with an equity card as a Doctor for any occasion.
Jo Martin’s Doctor is presumably pre-Hartnell, so why is her TARDIS a police box (albeit with a much nicer interior than Jodie’s giant Tibetan salt lamp,) and indeed, why does she even identify as the Doctor, when in the original series he didn’t even start calling himself the Doctor until he was Tom Baker (check out any of the first three Doctors’ stories, and they’re always introduced as the Doctor by one of the companion characters, rather than the portentious “I am usually known as the Doctor” or variants thereof of the JNT years.) It’s just a bit of a bodge job, which’ll piss off the fanboys and confuse the general public.
Still, I suppose none of this matters in the long run – until the 1980s the original series didn’t bother much about canon and continuity, which never seemed to hurt it much. I do think that maybe a rest of a few years could do the show good though, then bring it back with a few tweaks and a new showrunner, rather than have it limp to an inconclusive end like it did in 1989, unloved by the TV audience and the BBC 6th Floor alike…