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