Doctor Who review: An Unearthly Child

This is where it all starts. The Doctor, the Tardis, the companions, time and space travel, all of it. Nearly 60 years of Doctor Who began in a junkyard in London in 1963. And what an underwhelming start it was.

Don’t get me wrong, the first of the four episodes in this serial is genius. Absolutely iconic and perfect. There is no way it could have set up the show we would come to know and love better. I think almost all the iconic elements of Doctor Who, all 58 years of it, can be found in the first episode of An Unearthly Child: the character of the Doctor, the companions and the Doctor-companion dynamic, time and space travel, character-driven storytelling, the moral overtones. These things would develop and evolve as the show got older, but it’s astonishing and a testament to the genius of the show’s formula, that the next 60 years of Doctor Who were, for the most part, all there in the very first 25-minute episode.

It’s the rest of the three episodes in this pilot serial that are underwhelming. Sure, it’s all orthodox, standard-issue Doctor Who, but it’s mediocre Doctor Who, too. There’d be a lot more of that to come. 75 minutes of mind-numbing caveman politics and the Doctor and his new companions trying to extricate themselves from the cavemen’s dim-witted clutches does not engaging television make, even, I expect, by 1963’s standards.

But let’s get past that and focus on what An Unearthly Child does right. First there’s the character dynamics. Right from episode 1, the show establishes the formula that would prove its success: the Doctor-companion relationship, and the focus on the companions as the main characters, the audience avatar (in this case, Ian and Barbara), rather than the alien Doctor. Ian and Barbara are introduced as likeable and very strong characters, anchors of familiarity when the viewer is suddenly transported into the unfamiliar world of the Palaeolithic alongside an alien girl and her eccentric grandfather.

The Doctor himself is established strongly. In our first meeting with Hartnell’s First Doctor, we’re left with an impression of him as a mysterious, enigmatic figure, someone with an identity to hide. As the serial unfolds, we’re shown more of the Doctor’s character. This isn’t the fully-developed Doctor we see by the time he takes the form of David Tennant strutting across our screen in his trenchcoat and Converses moralising to anyone who’ll listen; the seeds of David Tennant’s Doctor are there, but the Doctor of An Unearthly Child is still very much a Doctor working out who he is, what he’s about, and what his values are.

There’s the infamous scene where the Doctor tentatively takes up a stone with the intention of cracking open a caveman’s skull, only to be stopped by Ian, the voice of sense and virtue. But this also isn’t the Doctor we would later see who would boldly take charge of this shitty situation and try to fix it and (hopefully) leave everyone happy—Hartnell’s Doctor doesn’t give a damn about the cavemen’s problems, he just wants to remove himself and his friends from their capture, even if that involves decapitating a caveman, something later Doctors would not contemplate. Even though he’s played by an older man, it’s obvious that Hartnell’s Doctor is very much a younger Time Lord than David Tennant’s and Matt Smith’s Doctors.

Episode 1 Susan is wonderful, enigmatic and interesting in her own way as we’re shown clips of her blurting out very un-teenage girl-ish things in class, and of Ian and Barbara pontificating about her strangeness and plotting to stalk her to her inexplicable home. From episode 2 she’s already devolved into the screeching, air-headed teen girl she would remain for the rest of her tenure by the First Doctor’s side. Which is a shame, because the Susan we’re introduced to in episode 1 had the potential to be a genuinely strong and interesting companion.

There’s not much to say about the actual plot of this pilot serial other than that it’s about cavemen bickering non-stop over how they can make fire and who gets to be boss caveman while they keep the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara captive for no clear reason. It does drag awfully, but the dialogue between the Doctor and his new companions as they work together to figure out how to get themselves out of their situation is worth the watch. If you see the derivative caveman rubbish as the generic backdrop to the story of the Doctor and his companions’ first adventure and how, as new travel companions, they work together to fix the unfortunate situation they’ve found themselves in, it’s actually not a bad story.

Look, as a simple pilot whose purpose is to introduce the main characters, establish the formula of the show, what they do, what the show is about, and what the audience can expect from future episodes, An Unearthly Child does the job. It will feature on no list of all-time Doctor Who classics except with sole reference to the first of its four episodes, which was genius, the remaining three being mostly forgettable filler. But it’s done what it’s supposed to do, and whet the audience’s appetite for more adventures with the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara.

Rating: 7/10.

Review: A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

Although I have seen screen adaptations of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol before, A Tale of Two Cities was the first of Charles Dickens’ novels I’ve read. I picked the book up after reading the gushing praise, via tweet, directed at it from the historian Tom Holland as he also read it for the first time. Tom Holland, one of my favourite historians and, no less, one of my favourite people to follow on Twitter, never misses the mark in his reading recommendations, so with intent I sought out a copy of Dickens’ most popular book according to Goodreads.

I was not disappointed. A Tale of Two Cities is a beautiful story of two lovers and their circle of loyal friends and family in the time of the French Revolution. There is a diverse cast of characters from varying classes, ages, professions and ideologies across two nations. Although the maiden Lucie, her father Dr Manette, and her husband Charles Darnay, are the central characters of the plot, the narrative sweeps back and forth between Paris and London, from character to character, giving you an intimate feel for the diversity of people’s experiences and lives in the world of the 1760s to 1790s.

The most extraordinary and captivating character’s story is of course the story of Dr Manette, who was imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille and close to lost his mind in the process. His character’s arc, from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs (and, briefly, rapidly down again), is the most satisfyingly plotted in the novel. Other characters won my heart in their several ways, most of all the heroic Sydney Carton (who, in his early appearances in the story, reminded me uncomfortably of myself, so I am glad he was redeemed), but also the wonderful pantomime villain, the terrifying Madame Defarge. Some characters, though, could have done with being given more attention and development, such as Barsad and Cly (I never did work out who they actually were).

The book also evokes its setting in the time of the French Revolution quite expressively. It exposes the injustices and outrages of the ancien régime, and then lays bare the horrors of the French Revolution and its bloody, fevered Reign of Terror. A roguish Revolutionary Tribunal condemns scores of the denounced to the Guillotine daily. Drunken, liberated Citizens dance the frenzied Carmagnole through the streets of Republican Paris. The cream of the overthrown nobility—gentle men, women and children—are corralled in La Force Prison like cattle awaiting slaughter.

It’s a simplistic, picture book representation of the pre- and post-Revolutionary conditions in France, but it’s what the story calls for—A Tale of Two Cities is, after all, basically a Victorian YA novel penned by a consummate writer and storyteller, not a serious work of literature (which is not a bad thing). It’s also very much the picture of the times an (English) writer from 1859, informed both by 19th Century Romanticism and Victorian English chauvinism, would paint. Dickens’ historiography is also picture-book (and reflects his own political predilections): he makes clear his view that the horrors of the Revolution followed the injustices of the ancien régime as inevitably as night follows day, and would reappear anywhere else the conditions of the pre-Revolutionary society reproduced themselves:

Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

My only criticisms of the book would be that the dialogue of some of the characters is somewhat contrived and unrealistic, although this is forgivable in pre-modern, Victorian literature. The Second Book (of three) also drags a bit, but the Third Book (which includes the storming of the Bastille and Darnay’s imprisonment and trial) more than makes up for it.

I was not ready for it, I was not expecting it, but the final line of the book is one of the most powerful and moving I’ve read in any book: “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Those who’ve read the book know. As the climax of the events leading up to that line, and as the climax of the arc of the character who spoke it, it just hits the right spot. Since I finished the book yesterday I’ve been reciting it over and over in my head, so perfect it was. The perfect, if tragic, ending to a wonderful story.

Rating: 8/10.

Thoughts on: Demons of the Punjab

My history teacher in high school once recommended me a book called Montaillou, written by the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. In it, Ladurie examines the lives of the residents of a small Occitan village in the early 14^th Century from the records of a local church register. Through examining the lives and beliefs of the villagers of Montaillou, who were broadly adherents of the medieval Christian heresy known as Catharism, Ladurie takes a microscopic look at the much larger historical episode of the Albigensian Crusade, the Catholic Church’s medieval inquisition against the Cathars which resulted in the movement’s all but complete annihilation. For its time it was a novel method of historical analysis, examining events and movements at the sweeping macro level by plunging down to the micro level and looking at what was happening “on the ground”, where the people were.

In what it was trying to do, Demons of the Punjab reminded me a bit of Montaillou. Demons of the Punjab was about what happened when Yas’s grandmother tried to marry a Hindu man at the frenzied height of the Partition of India. But it was also about the Partition of India itself. Prem, a Hindu living on the newly-created Indian-Pakistani border, got himself killed for marrying a Muslim woman. His Muslim widow, Umbreen, fled to England. There were many, many more Prems and Umbreens – up to 2 million people died in the Partition of India, and 14 million were displaced. The point is that the hate-fuelled violence that erupted along the new border wasn’t confined to Yas’s grandmother’s farm in the Punjab – what Partition did to Umbreen’s family is a microcosm of what was happening millions of times over all over that border.

There are surely many ways Doctor Who could tell a story about the Partition of India, including ways a lot less subtle and gentle than the approach taken in Demons of the Punjab. But I think the Montaillou approach to historical storytelling tends to work much more effectively than the sledgehammer approach of driving the Tardis straight into the thick of the action, given that Doctor Who is a show so focussed on individual human lives. And, as writer Vinay Patel told Radio Times, fifty minutes isn’t enough time to do justice to the full trauma and magnitude of Partition – but, for a look at the microscopic level of the effects of Partition on one family, Demons of the Punjab is a pretty solid effort.

The history teacher who recommended Montaillou to me also taught me about the Partition of India when I was 15. I was fortunate enough to have had a history teacher who thought such historical episodes were worth teaching to Australian schoolchildren – to whom the relevance of such episodes is tenuous at best – simply because they were interesting. I think I was one of the few outside the Indian Subcontinent who actually learned about the Partition of India in school – certainly in Australia, where most of us at school are nourished on a bland and uninteresting historical diet of Australian history, World War I, World War II, and, if we’re lucky, a bit of British history.

No Australian school student has ever enjoyed the experience of learning about Australian history – and the history teacher I’m talking about once told me he thought Australia was the country with the most boring history in the world. Being taught by this teacher about Ancient Rome, the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Albigensian Crusade and, yes, the Partition of India, made me a much keener student of history than did learning about Lyndon B. Johnson’s visit to Australia in 1966 (no offence, LBJ). Which is why I think it’s a good thing that Doctor Who is taking up the mantle of teaching the interesting and important history those in the audience who never had the fortune of being taught by Mr McRoberts never learned in school, but who instead had to endure soporific lessons about Australian foreign policy in the 1930s.

Anyway – could you tell that this episode was the first of Series 11 written by someone other than Chris Chibnall? It feels different to what we’ve been watching for the past few weeks, which, as I’ve been complaining, has felt, somewhat disappointingly, much like the same show Steven Moffat produced for the previous eight years. It seems like it took a debutant Doctor Who writer to do what the showrunner wouldn’t and make a Doctor Who that feels distinctly different. It’s not a radical shakeup, but the pacing, the plotting, the tone and even the dialogue makes this feel like a different kind of Doctor Who. It feels more earnest, and somehow more human than what we’ve been seeing so far. This, I’m sure, is due to how Vinay Patel sees this as a story about the Partition of India first and a Doctor Who episode second, and this is actually the closest Doctor Who has come to a pure historical since Black Orchid in Peter Davison’s first season: neither the Doctor nor the otherworldly intruders in this episode actually did anything other than passively observe historical events happening, which put those historical events themselves under the spotlight in this episode.

So, the “monsters” in this episode – spooky, terrifying, wraith-like beings called Thijarians – weren’t actually the monsters in this episode. The monsters in this episode were humans, prejudiced and radicalised into committing acts of evil. It’s not the hottest of takes, but there’s no doubt it’s always worth repeating. Because this was the angle the episode decided to take, I wondered if it wasn’t also partly a predictable dig at Brexit, given that it was all about how awful it is to divide people up along ethnic and religious lines and how silly all these divisions between people and imaginary lines on the map are anyway. But, no – perhaps Brexit was floating somewhere in Vinay Patel’s mind when he was writing this script, but it’s clear this is supposed to be a story about the Partition of India long before it’s anything else, by a writer who has clearly wanted to write this story for a long time. Even Remembrance Sunday got a more prominent look in before Brexit, in the form of those Thijarians whose sole mission and purpose in life is to honour the forgotten dead of the universe (which was a nice touch to mark the 100^th anniversary of the end of hostilities in Europe, even if you could hardly call this a “Remembrance Day special”).

Yas gets a lot of screentime this week, which I’m hardly going to complain about. And it’s about time, too – she’s been most likeable companion of the bunch (I can see Graham becoming irritating) but also the least developed. What we learn about her isn’t especially staggering – nothing on the level of a broken home or a dead wife: she loves her family and admires her grandmother, which is boring, but it’s also refreshingly wholesome. It’s refreshing to have a companion who’s just normal and healthy and happy and boring, for once. Because even Steven Moffat’s attempt at introducing a boring, “normal” companion somehow still left the fandom asking whether Bill Potts was a regenerated Susan Foreman. Yas is properly boring (which, again, is a good thing), as we learned in this episode. And this is, really, all we needed to see to tick Yas’s “development” box, at least for now.

I think this is the strongest episode of the series yet, overtaking the previous favourite of The Ghost Monument. Like that episode, Demons of the Punjab thrusts in the direction of a very original interpretation of Doctor Who, and a very fresh vision of what this show can be. None of the six episodes we’ve seen of Series 11 so far have been weak, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the scripts that have been the strongest, in my opinion, have been the ones that have done something ambitious and different. Strong but otherwise unambitious scripts like Arachnids in the UK and Rosa, which might have topped the series ratings as late as Series 8, just don’t do it anymore. I’m sorry to keep repeating this point every week (frankly, it’s getting boring on my end, too), but Doctor Who has to do things differently if it wants to survive. Demons of the Punjab, therefore, is an assured step in the right direction.

Rating: 9/10.

Thoughts on: The Tsuranga Conundrum

I haven’t seen Alien. I don’t know what happens in it, either. But lots of people are comparing The Tsuranga Conundrum to Alien, and because I haven’t seen it I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a good thing. From the fact that the comparison is being made, though, I can gather that Alien is probably about an alien that boards a human spacecraft in the 67^th or maybe the 42^nd or the 93^rd Century and wreaks havoc, probably dramatically killing numerous people, while the human crew and passengers frantically try to steer the ship to safety. How did I go? I just looked up the plot on Wikipedia and I’m delighted to report that I’ve got it right – although it was the 22^nd Century, not the 93^rd.

I could guess the plot of the film everyone is comparing this episode to because it’s not exactly the most complex of storylines – nor particularly the most original. The base-under-siege-by-a-berserk-killer-alien-that’s-going-to-eat-us-all is a staple of the sci-fi genre. Doctor Who has done it a number of times before, in one form or another: there was 42 and The Impossible Planet and Flesh and Stone and Under the Lake and even Midnight. This is nothing new. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. There’s a Doctor Who reviewer I like reading whose benchmark for a good Doctor Who story is basically “something I’ve never seen before”. I’m with this reviewer insofar as I’d prefer to see Doctor Who do new, original things rather than persistently rehashing old ideas, but originality doth not by itself a good Doctor Who make (as Love and Monsters is testament), and unoriginality doth not by itself make bad Doctor Who.

And that’s more or less how I feel about The Tsuranga Conundrum. Not great, but not bad, either. It’s fun. It holds the attention for its 50 minutes’ running time. It’s another worthy addition to the Doctor Who canon. But, no, it doesn’t do anything especially interesting or important. No one’s going to remember The Tsuranga Conundrum or put it in a Top 10 list of anything (or Bottom 10, for that matter). And that’s okay. Not every Doctor Who story has to be Heaven Sent. It’s okay to be The Tsuranga Conundrum. There’s a place for the Tsuranga Conundrums and the Dinosaurs on a Spaceships and the Gridlocks of the Doctor Who canon. I love Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, by the way – I think it’s the best episode of Series 7 (which, to be fair, isn’t really saying much).

As the latest iteration on the base-under-siege genre, it was fine. It wasn’t a stellar exemplar of the genre, but it wasn’t a poor effort, either. I thought the episode was about to dip into an unrelenting downward trajectory when I saw that the alien from which the base was under siege was not the great, carnivorous, many-toothed beastie I thought we were about to see, but a rather cute, squeezable beastlet measuring about 1 foot high called a Pting. He reminded me of a mix between a toad and a Niffler from Harry Potter. Not particularly intimidating, and the sight of the Doctor edging cautiously towards what looked like a cute Japanese plush toy come alive was a bit comical, a bit killer rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“That’s no ordinary rabbit, that’s the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!”). Maybe the intern was given the task of designing this one.

But no matter — it did its job. It caused enough havoc and drama (mostly off-screen, it must be said) to make the characters’ impending doom pretty convincing. The best moments of this episode, though, weren’t the mayhem and the action, but the quieter character moments: there was Ryan reflecting, glassy-eyed, about his parents and his childhood to a captivated Yas. There was the Doctor fawning reverently over the antimatter generator, in the most Doctorish little passage I’ve seen from Whittaker yet. There was the Doctor suddenly being hit by Astos’s rebuke that she was being selfish and belligerent and not like the Doctor at all. There was Durkas and Ronan touchingly making up after losing the woman they both loved (insofar as a robot can love…) The character writing has consistently been the best aspect of this series, which should come as no surprise given that Chris Chibnall has already proven his chops as a master character writer (for a citation on this, I will never stop recommending Born and Bred – watch it!). Even the supporting characters have been consistently good, which is still the case this week – even the “synth robot” Ronan, General Eve Cicero’s partner (I guess, kind of like a 67^th Century sexbot).

All I’ll say about Jodie Whittaker this week is that she’s getting better and better. She had more good moments in this episode than any yet – it’s just a shame the scripts are getting more and more ordinary. What I’m enjoying seeing from Whittaker, even if her Doctor isn’t dazzling me yet, is that she’s clearly having fun. The first few sequences of the Doctor staggering around on the ship after awakening from being blown to smithereens were great because Whittaker was clearly enjoying herself. It still feels strange to hear other characters address Whittaker as “Doctor”, but there’s no doubt she’s having fun, and when Whittaker is having fun, we’re having fun. And if Whittaker is having fun being the Doctor, she can only get better as time goes on.

Finally, while this episode was by no means bad, something I will take issue with is that we’re now halfway through Series 11 and we’re still being served up average to good-but-not-great scripts. My attitude towards The Tsuranga Conundrum is a good metaphor for the quality of the series so far: not great, but not bad; just fine. We’ve seen nothing so far that has made Series 11 worthwhile or that would make me look back on Series 11 with anything other than indifference. The Ghost Monument looked promising, but it did nothing more than whet the appetite. Series 11 so far hasn’t delivered the promised main course. If anything, it’s actually gone backwards – the last two episodes have been fine in themselves, but have felt the most like the Doctor Who this series is supposed to be getting away from so far. It’s not a great start to what was supposed to be a brave, exciting new era. This series isn’t generating excitement or reeling in couchloads of new viewers. And it matters because we’ve now reached the halfway point for this series. From next week we’re on the home stretch – Series 11 has five more episodes to get its act together.

Rating: 7/10.

Thoughts on: Arachnids in the UK

Who remembers Kill the Moon? Cast your minds back to the heady days of Series 8, when much of the Doctor Who fanbase was still in shock from Peter Capaldi thundering down the camera as a raw, roughly-hewn Twelfth Doctor. The most memorable thing about that highly polarising episode, plonked right in the middle of Series 8, was that it was billed as an arachnid-riddled tribute to Philip Hinchcliffe, but ended up being more a live-action abortion debate in space which culminated in the Doctor and Clara dramatically breaking up. Although it was hated by many, I actually didn’t mind Kill the Moon, but what I was disappointed about was being cheated out of the nightmarish, Hinchcliffe-esque horror story we were promised. The spiders weren’t even that good.

That’s not something that can be said about Arachnids in the UK, although this one, too, indulges in what now appears to be the obligatory share of political commentary. These spiders were horrifying, a fitting tribute to the legacy of Philip Hinchcliffe. I don’t have insider knowledge about how the BBC spends its money, but it’s increasingly clear that the Beeb has flicked a bit more dosh Doctor Who’s way this year, because Series 11 has looked visibly more stunning than the Who we’re used to. Testament to this is how much more realistic and skin-crawlingly horrifying the CGI spiders in this episode were than the last time Doctor Who tried to scare us with eight-legged beasties. Frankly, it says something that the thing I found more unconvincing wasn’t gigantic spiders but the fact that the Doctor, Yasmin and the rest of them didn’t spend the entire episode alternately rooted, petrified, to the spot or running in the opposite direction screaming their heads off.

It does seem like Chibnall has taken a conscious decision to dial up the creepiness this year. Even more gruesome than the spiders, actually, I thought, was Yas’s neighbour cocooned like an Egyptian mummy in cobwebs in her bed. Super freaky, and straight out of the horror writer’s playbook. In The Woman Who Fell to Earth we had a villain, looking like one of those disgusting characters out the front of ghost rides at funfairs, who plucked teeth from his victims and stuck them into his face as trophies.

This is something I’m totally on board with. Delighting in being scared and horrified is something that unites all ages of Doctor Who viewers, children and grown-ups alike. Adults really just want to be scared like children are. And Mary Whitehouse may have complained sanctimoniously in the seventies that Doctor Who’s monsters would traumatise children, but children love nothing more than being traumatised, as I learned from my encounters with several of them on Hallowe’en this year. I’m still traumatised by The Empty Child, and to this day I can’t look a gas mask in the face without coming over with a bad case of goose bumps, but watching The Empty Child as a frightened 10-year old started off in me an enduring love of Doctor Who and its scary monsters.

Donald Trump was there, too, in the form of an obnoxious business magnate with high political ambitions called Robertson. Well, he wasn’t really a Donald Trump analogue, even though he was clearly supposed to be. At least, he wasn’t an analogue of the version of Trump we’re told to hate by the people on the telly. Trump is dim, blustering, erratic and bravado-driven, while Robertson was cunning, calculating, cold and ambitious. In other words, Trump is a Gryffindor while Robertson was a Slytherin. I actually think that Donald Trump is much shrewder than people give him credit for, but that’s a discussion for another day. Robertson, played by Chris Noth, was an entertaining presence in the episode nonetheless, even if his role in the episode as a stick to jab at stupid Americans with their guns and their capitalism and their misogyny and their Donald Trump was a bit – and this is the second week in a row I’m using this word – preachy.

By the way, what exactly was the point of the standoff between the Doctor and the American over shooting the spiders? I’m just a little confused about where the Doctor is at now with her opposition to using guns, because in this episode she wouldn’t countenance using guns to kill gigantic spiders that were about to go on a murderous rampage around Sheffield, and in The Ghost Monument she refused to use guns against killer robots. Robots. Has the Doctor’s opposition to using guns turned from something moral to something theological? Are guns now unclean to the Doctor, like pigs are to Jews and Muslims? Because that’s what it looks like.

And it was never really explained to us when, and why, the Doctor added spiders, and presumably cockroaches and vermin, too, to her list of Living Creatures With Dignity Whose Lives Must Be Protected At All Costs. When it came to the Doctor staring down Robertson over shooting all the spiders, I was kind of on Robertson’s side. So, I suspect, was much of the audience. They’re spiders. I hate them. When I see them in my house I stamp on them – or, rather, spray them with bug spray because I’m too scared to go near them. But, really, I want an answer to this: how far does the Doctor’s principle of protecting life extend, and why?

I was surprised to learn that this was actually the first episode of the series that was filmed, because Whittaker looks more comfortable and fluent in the role than I’ve seen her yet – certainly much more so than in the series opener. It could just be that I’ve got used to watching Whittaker as the Doctor – or maybe I’m slowly coming round to this whole female Doctor business. The sequences in Yas’s apartment, with the Doctor acting endearingly awkward and weird in a normal social situation – very Matt Smith, in other words – were very good. I’m also coming round to the Scooby Gang arrangement this year – no doubt it’s hard writing for four main characters along with a handful of supporting characters each week, but, so far, miraculously, they’re pulling it off.

On a final note, something that I will mention, but not necessarily criticise, is that this feels more like the Doctor Who of Steven Moffat than the brave new, mature, grown-up Who it briefly looked like we were getting in The Ghost Monument, which still remains, I think, the best episode of this series so far. The latest two episodes have conspicuously retreated back into familiar, comfortable Moffat territory. I say I’m not going to criticise this because they’ve been good episodes – this is a good episode (well, it was fine) – and comparing something to Steven Moffat’s work is by no means itself a criticism, coming from me (one of the few Moffat partisans who looks upon his era with undiluted approval), but weren’t we supposed to be doing something new from now on? Weren’t we supposed to be moving on from Moffat and radically reimagining Doctor Who? I’ve written at length about this theme so I won’t repeat myself yet again here, but I will simply point out that so far my warnings have been vindicated: from the 10.96 million who watched The Woman Who Fell to Earth, viewing figures have fallen to 6.43 million this week, only about a million or so above the average of Series 10. Changing the Doctor’s gender, by itself, is not enough to win back viewers.

Rating: 7/10.

Thoughts on: Rosa

Last week I criticised The Ghost Monument – otherwise a good episode – for being, at times, patronising. I said, “I’m not opposed to Doctor Who pushing ethical or philosophical lessons, or even trying to appeal to children, but I don’t like feeling like I’m being patronised. Neither, for that matter, do children.” If Doctor Who last week was patronising, this week it was positively unctuous. If last week Doctor Who spoke rather transparently to the kids in the audience, this week it was basically a live-action adaptation of one of those edifying, good-citizen-making children’s storybooks about Inspirational Women Who Changed The World.

And, as they would say in Sheffield, there’s nowt wrong with that. As I said, there’s nothing wrong with Doctor Who pitching itself at children – it is a children’s show, even if I would prefer it to pitch itself at me – but there’s a right and a wrong way of doing it. There’s appealing to children and there’s being patronising. There’s speaking to children in language they understand and that’s meaningful to them, and there’s treating them like idiots. Children aren’t idiots, and they know when they’re being patronised. In entertainment terms, the elementary rule of “show, don’t tell” surely applies even more emphatically when making TV for children.

This episode, thankfully, gets it right. I’ll admit – I think I would only be able to stomach one of these kinds of scripts per series. Because I’m a grown-up with grown-up tastes in television and I already know very well that racism ain’t it chief – I don’t need it to be preached at me every week. But for this series’ sole allowance of preachy, moralistic, right-on, “being-racist-is-bad” stories, it’s not a bad one. It certainly tackled the subject of racism much more powerfully than Doctor Who, or at least the modern series, has before. Taking us back to 1955 Alabama and showing us the full, incensing ugliness of racist attitudes in the era of segregation is a lot more confronting than the show’s previous limp efforts at showing us that racism is bad. Ryan getting biffed across the face by a pink-faced Southerner for having the temerity to speak to a white woman makes the point a great deal more forcefully than pantomime bad-guy Lord Sutcliffe calling Bill “this creature” in Thin Ice.

This and the other overt, confronting displays of racism in this episode will have the intended effect on the children who watched it, the way “you filthy little Mudblood” did on me when I was at that impressionable young age. And it says something that this episode made me genuinely fear for the safety of the diverse members of the Tardis team in a way I didn’t when it was Martha in Elizabethan England or Bill in Georgian London. And it’s worth pointing out that the way the Doctor and Graham seemed reluctant throughout the episode to directly confront the people’s racist attitudes shows how brave it was for Rosa Parks to do what she did. But it was also clever, if cynical writing: if the Doctor had, as the Doctor normally does, put the racists in their place, the power of what Rosa did at the end of the episode would have been diminished.

The bad guy of this episode, too, was a thoughtful addition to the theme. I was a little disappointed when I realised that this wasn’t going to be the first pure historical since the Davison era, but Krasko being a time travelling white supremacist from the distant future who’s trying to avert the historical defeat of white supremacism by stopping Rosa Parks from protesting bus segregation is the only sci-fi intrusion that I will accept into what would otherwise be a long-awaited pure historical. Krasko was creepy for how familiar, how normal he was, how this villainous white supremacist could easily be your mate from work. He was creepy for how, it seems, the kind of skin-crawling racial supremacism we thought we left behind in 1955 is still festering in the minds of some in the distant future – and if it’s alive in the distant future, it’s alive today.

If it’s all just a bit on the preachy side, it’s still a great episode. It’s intriguing, there’s lots happening, lots of good dialogue, and the right characters get respectively blasted back to the distant past or honoured with Congressional Medals. I’m still trying to get used to the slower pace of Doctor Who now. I don’t know if it’s that I’m just used to the quicker pace that both Moffat and Davies liked to take things at, or that “slow-burn Doctor Who” is something that takes more practice to get right than Chibnall and his writers have had. Most likely it’s both. But it does feel like the script is struggling, at times, to fill in its running time, given the amount of calm talking and sneaking around they all do that we don’t usually get to see.

If nothing else, though, the increased running time and the slower pace of episodes gives us more time to spend with the characters, and more time for the characters to spend talking to each other. That’s not a terrible trade-off. I think these companions are already better developed – and better written – than almost any of the modern series companions. Gareth Roberts (who wrote The Lodger, The Shakespeare Code and The Unicorn and the Wasp) tweeted something I thought worth repeating: “Oh, and another thing. They all speak like normal people, not in smart-ass sassy writers room-ese.” It’s so true: I love Amy and Clara and Rose, but they look and sound like comic book characters next to Ryan and Graham. I don’t say next to Yasmin, too, because, even though Yasmin seems like a lovely person and a great addition to the Tardis team, unfortunately she hasn’t had very much to say or do yet. I hope that changes in the next few weeks, because she really does look like a promising character.

So my verdict on this one is basically that it’s a very good episode, but it’s the kind of thing I only want in moderation, by which I mean no more than one of these per series. Any more than that and I think I’d go off the whole thing. Let’s get back to some hard sci-fi adventuring next week, please. Oh, and you’ll notice that I didn’t do my weekly update on how the Female Doctor Project is going – that’s because there wasn’t really much to say this week. Jodie Whittaker continues to perform well, and she did some strong work this week, especially when she was facing off against Krasko, but she’s not dazzling me. I haven’t become enraptured by her yet. We’re still in “watch-this-space” territory.

Oh, and it’s brilliant, isn’t it, that we’re back to a misbehaving, capricious Tardis that spits out the Doctor and her companions at completely random places in space and time. This does actually feel very Hartnell era, and the show is all the better for it. Down with obedient Tardises and part-time companions, I say.

Rating: 8/10.

Thoughts on: The Ghost Monument

Now this is more like it. I was worried, for a moment, that The Woman Who Fell to Earth was going to set the tone for the rest of the series. It’s not that that episode was rubbish – it was okay, as far as openers go – it’s just that it didn’t do anything especially interesting. It didn’t do anything that made me excited about the direction Doctor Who was being taken. But I needn’t have worried. I’m pleased to say that this week’s episode, The Ghost Monument, has roundly dispelled my fears. This is much, much closer to the Doctor Who I wanted to see this year – which means that it put a lot of clear blue water between itself and the Doctor Who of Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies and steered into exciting and heretofore uncharted expanses.

This is, really, a very different Doctor Who. I’m really happy to be typing those words, because a “really, very different Doctor Who” is what I wanted from Chris Chibnall’s new regime this year, and what Doctor Who itself desperately needed. It’s difficult for long-time fans to appreciate how far the show has come, because although it’s a visible shift from what the show was doing in Series 9 and 10, it isn’t a huge one. But I’d recommend watching something from Series 1 – say, Aliens of London – and The Ghost Monument back-to-back. You can discern how much the show has changed not only by how different it looks, but especially by how different it feels. This is a much more mature and grown-up Doctor Who. The characters are less cartoonish and more layered, the dialogue is more mature, the plotting is more thoughtful; most visibly, everything just looks so much more sumptuous, although budget has a lot to do with that. This feels closer to a show like Firefly than it does to early New Who – there’s a strong grounding in characters and relationships, but the sci-fi is gritty and serious. In a word, this Doctor Who is real to a greater extent than any version of the show has been yet.

I hoped I wasn’t getting ahead of myself with my excitement over this episode, but my impressions not only stood up but were reinforced by a rewatch. If this is any harbinger of the series ahead, then we’re surely in for an exciting eleventh series, and hopefully a twelfth and thirteenth after that. No doubt, there’s the possibility that this episode isn’t any indication of what lies ahead, but the series goes back to doing whatever it was doing in last week’s underwhelming opener. I really hope that isn’t the case.

The other thing that’s better in this episode is Jodie Whittaker and her Doctor. Last week I wasn’t convinced by a first look at a Thirteenth Doctor that came off as a somewhat cringey David Tennant tribute act. There are still bits of that left here, and it’s still jarring and cringey when she shifts into that mode. But the whole performance has been toned down, and she’s much the better for it. I noticed that Jodie Whittaker seems to be at her best in the role when she’s not trying too hard to play “the Doctor”, but just playing her lines the way she feels they ought to be played. She’s much, much more Doctorly when she’s just playing her natural game rather than trying to ape David Tennant or any other Doctor. She plays “feisty Yorkshirewoman” (which, I’m sure, is how Jodie Whittaker would describe herself) much better than she plays “manic and quirky”, or “David Tennant”.

That’s the other thing about Whittaker’s Doctor: that she’s the first female Doctor, so there are no precedents she can easily riff off. A female Doctor can’t not be played materially differently from a male Doctor – Whittaker has to forge her own path in this respect. I think she’s going about it the right way: rather than apologising for being a female Doctor and trying to be a male Doctor in women’s clothes, she’s embracing her femininity and making it part of her character. Sure, Whittaker’s Doctor is strong and assertive in the way that the male Doctors have always been, but she’s more emotionally present and open, especially in the way she interacts with her companions, in a way that none of the male Doctors have ever been, but in a way that women generally are but men aren’t. Unless you’re looking for it you might not notice it because Jodie Whittaker is a woman, but this is something very new and different, and very interesting, for the Doctor.

Finally, can we say a word about Chibnall’s superb character writing? I was sceptical when it was first revealed that the Doctor would have an entire Scooby Gang tagging along after her this season, but Chibnall really has excelled himself with the companions so far. Testament to this is that – although I haven’t visited Gallifrey Base yet – I can’t see how any fans could actively dislike any of these companions the way virtually every companion since Rose (bar Wilf) has had their own sizeable contingent of haters. And what’s interesting about at least two of these three companions is that they’re carrying around the emotion of Grace’s death last episode, emotion that, as we’ve seen, is clearly infecting their relationship and is bound to boil over at some point later in the series. That’s a bit more interesting than the Ten-Rose-Mickey love triangle in Series 2. Even the grizzled, battle-hardened side characters in this episode were highly memorable and thoughtfully put together, which should come as no surprise: character writing has always been what Chibnall excels at, as anyone who’s seen Broadchurch and Born and Bred would know.

If there’s a criticism I’d make of this episode, it’s that the Moral Lesson of the Week (“we’re stronger together”) is laid on just a bit too thick. I think maybe the Doctor scolded Epzo pointedly for his Randian outlook just one too many times, and delivered just one too many syrupy soliloquies about working together. It all felt a bit patronising. Maybe this is Chibnall’s feeble gesture towards the idea that Doctor Who is still for children, in arguably the most grown-up version of Doctor Who yet. I’m not opposed to Doctor Who pushing ethical or philosophical lessons, or even trying to appeal to children, but I don’t like feeling like I’m being patronised. Neither, for that matter, do children.

Oh, and the Tardis looks nice. Not at all what I was expecting, but I suppose I was expecting something a bit more like the Eleventh Doctor’s or the Twelfth Doctor’s Tardis, and I suppose it’s a bit difficult to do that without looking like you’re just riffing off Moffat’s Tardises. I suppose it fits what looks like it’s going to be the tone of this series though: it’s grittier and grungier and more alien. Bring it on.

Rating: 8/10.

Thoughts on: The Woman Who Fell to Earth

And there we go. Just like that a brave new era of Doctor Who is inaugurated and a shiny new Doctor baptised. What’s the bet that Chris Chibnall was gnawing his fingernails as The Woman Who Fell to Earth aired on Sunday? If he wasn’t, he should have been. There was an enormous amount riding on Chibnall’s first episode of Doctor Who as showrunner. It’s no exaggeration to say that this was the most important episode of Doctor Who since The Eleventh Hour back in 2010 (if we don’t count The Day of the Doctor, which was also very important, but for a different reason).

It’s not just about whether or not the first female Doctor is destined to be the only female Doctor. It’s also about the continuing relevance of a show whose ratings have been on an unrelenting downward trajectory since David Tennant’s last season, and whether or not the Chibnall-Whittaker era will prove to be to the revived series what the McCoy era was to the classic series. I recently stated my thesis on this matter here, but to restate it again briefly: unless the show came back radically changed in an exciting new way — unless it emphatically puts the Doctor Who of 2005-2017 behind it — it will continue to lose viewers and can expect three seasons at most before it’s cancelled.

Perhaps a bleak way to start a review, by prophesying doom, devastation and cancellation, but how else to underline how important it was for the new regime to get this right?

Mercifully, Chibnall and co. appear to have got the message. There was plenty that was new and different about Doctor Who in this episode. Most conspicuously, a new Doctor, with a new gender. How did that go, then? Actually, maybe it’s just the fact that I’ve long reconciled myself with the fact that the Thirteenth Doctor is a woman, but I wasn’t particularly bothered by the Doctor’s new gender. I noticed it, sure, but I noticed it in the same way that I noticed that the Twelfth Doctor had a Scottish accent in Deep Breath or that the Eleventh Doctor looked like a twelve year-old who might start flossing at any moment in The Eleventh Hour. It helped, I think, that the script didn’t dwell on the fact of the Doctor’s gender reassignment, electing to mention it briefly for a moment of comic relief before moving on, the Doctor’s reaction to discovering that she’s a she indicating how we, the audience, should react: “this doesn’t make any difference to me, so it shouldn’t make any difference to you”.

Is it just time that’s made me make peace with the idea of a female Doctor? Maybe. But this is very much a “watch-this-space” matter, because it’s early days. We’re only one episode in. I’m trying to keep that in mind, too, as I try to avoid prematurely passing judgment on the Thirteenth Doctor herself. Because I’m tempted to dissent from what seems to be the universally positive reception to Whittaker’s Doctor. I know from what I’ve seen of Jodie Whittaker before that she’s an actress of exceptional talent, but here I felt like I was watching someone’s rather crude idea of what the Doctor was supposed to sound and act like. The Doctor’s dialogue felt forced, the attempts at humour and whimsy were lame, and, I hate to say it, but the whole performance felt wooden. That’s on Chibnall as writer as much as it’s on Whittaker, because, apart from a couple of very strong lines, the dialogue Whittaker was given sounded like it was jotted down on a hasty first draft and never rewritten.

Maybe what bothered me most about this first look at the Thirteenth Doctor is that the Doctor felt like she didn’t have any distinctive personality beyond “hearty, somewhat eccentric northern lass”. What we saw was a generic, “whacky” Doctor consciously drawing on Matt Smith and David Tennant. To the extent that this Doctor had any personality, she felt like a caricature of Matt Smith’s zany, whacky Doctor, in the sense that this Doctor felt rather like a one-dimensional comic relief character, which really jarred with the mature, serious tone of the rest of the episode. To make a contrast with Peter Capaldi’s first episode, what we saw in Deep Breath was almost too much personality. We got a very good idea of what the Twelfth Doctor was about in his first episode, which came as a shock to some of us given how different Capaldi’s Doctor was from the Doctor we’d grown used to.

Am I being too harsh? Maybe. As I said, these are my raw, first impressions and I’m withholding judgment until I’ve seen more of the Thirteenth Doctor. I’m trying to keep in mind that Capaldi’s Doctor, too, left me cold initially, before growing on me immensely over his three seasons on the screen. I felt the same about Peter Davison’s Doctor, though for a different reason: while Capaldi started strong and continued to perform strong until the end, evolving his character along the way, it took Davison three seasons to work out how he wanted to play his Doctor, and only started performing strongly when he finally did. Jodie Whittaker is more likely to follow the Davison route, starting weak and unformed but working out her character over time. If that’s the case, we can allow her some time to warm up and find her feet before we pass judgment on her – it’s the same courtesy we’d extend to any new incumbent.

It’s conventional for Doctor and companion introduction stories to be relatively light on plot and details, with the focus of the script directed resolutely upon introducing the new characters. As this episode’s predecessors, being episodes that introduced a new Doctor and new companions at the same time, both Rose and The Eleventh Hour were in this vein, both being scripts that would have flopped had they been ordinary, mid-season episodes. This script was nothing new, then, except that the plot of neither of those two episodes left me distinctly bored. The villain of the piece is notable for being the first Doctor Who monster with dozens of human teeth stuck into its face – which looked, admittedly, fairly creepy – but otherwise it was a generic, unremarkable Doctor Who alien and the plot a generic, unremarkable Doctor Who monster runaround. The whole, very lengthy middle bit of this episode was boring in a way neither Rose nor The Eleventh Hour managed to be. Not the best way to usher in a brave new era.

What was more interesting was how different, tonally, it all felt. Chibnall made the wise decision to bump the running time up to a full 60 minutes and, combined with expensive new camera lenses and widescreen format, it makes the show look and feel much more impressive and cinematic. The Broadchurch influence is apparent, too, because the story takes advantage of the newly filled-out running time to allow for some genuine scene-setting and build-up, almost as if we’re watching an actual, serious drama show. A lot of the scene-setting in the first half of the episode, like the sequences introducing Ryan, Yasmin and Graham and bringing them all together, is the kind of slow-burn story-building that we’ve had to miss out on with fast-paced 45-minute runarounds.

Speaking of our new companions, Ryan, Yasmin and Graham (and Grace) are all great, but I’m still not convinced that three companions maybe isn’t just one or two too many. With four people running around after the Doctor, we never really got to know any of them very well, even with the longer running time. And the script was inevitably forced to resort to the trick that was the favourite of writers in the Davison era of splitting up the characters to get at least a couple out of the Doctor’s way. I get why Chibnall has gone with a four-person Tardis team – to draw the focus away from the Doctor, specifically her gender – but he’s definitely set himself a challenge by giving himself four main characters to write for from episode one. Aside from anything else, though, it’s wonderful that Ryan, Yasmin and Graham have become the Doctor’s new companions by their accidental whisking-away by the Doctor, just like in the classic series (Tegan comes to mind). Let’s hope Series 11 follows the classic series in another way and keeps the companions on the Tardis full-time rather than, as Clara and the Ponds preferred, the Tardis being a kind of space-time Uber that they board for cheeky after-work and weekend leisure trips.

So, to come back to the challenge I set Doctor Who: has it changed enough to bring back viewers and ensure its survival? The answer is that, obviously, I don’t know. Anyone who says they know is being fatuous, because it’s impossible to know: only time and viewing figures will tell. But the other reason I don’t know is because, even if I had to make a prediction, it’s too hard to say. No doubt this is a different Doctor Who, but will casual viewers notice the difference (beyond the Thirteenth Doctor’s gender)? Is it different enough to tempt back viewers who abandoned the show long ago out of boredom? If I were to make a prediction based on this episode alone, my answer would be “no”. But after watching the remaining nine episodes of this series (and the “Coming Soon” trailer actually looks really exciting), my answer might yet be “yes”. So my answer, right now, is “I don’t know”.

Rating: 6/10.

Thoughts on: Empress of Mars

(Gallifreyan Ramblings has an all new look! Read this on my blog!)

There’s a show from the 1970s called Ripping Yarns. It’s one of my favourite comedies, one of the many produced by the BBC around that time, written by and starring Monty Python alumni Michael Palin and Terry Jones. Over nine episodes, each with different settings and characters, it parodied the early 20^th Century “boys own adventure” stories targeted at the strapping, wholesome young boys of Imperial Britain. It ventured to such exotic settings as a German WWI prisoner of war camp, the Andes, the British Raj and Cornwall, always following some exciting and pseudo-heroic adventure.

Empress of Mars felt a bit like Doctor Who if it were made into a Ripping Yarns episode. Like Ripping Yarns, this episode is consciously parodying “boys own adventure” type stories of the early 20^th Century, which often featured hardy and romantic Victorian soldiers camped out in some far-flung frontier of the Empire. Just substitute Mars for Burma and an Ice Warrior carrying a serving tray for native servants and you’ve got yourself a Doctor Who story, with material for trite political commentary to boot. Actually the political commentary, such as it was, was fairly superficial, which makes this episode a deviation from the norm for this series. Maybe that’s a good thing, because I don’t think Gatiss really had his heart in pushing a political message in this episode. He really just wanted to make an Ice Warrior serve the Doctor and a couple of Victorian British Army officers tea in a cave on Mars. Which is absolutely fine.

But it’s also indulgent because it’s got Gatiss’s favourite era and Gatiss’s favourite monsters. It looks like Gatiss asked Steven Moffat to have his Christmas and his Birthday presents on the same day. In that sense it looks a lot like a parting gift to Gatiss from Moffat, and I wouldn’t be surprised, and I think Gatiss wouldn’t be surprised, if this were the last we saw of him. This wasn’t as good an Ice Warrior story as Gatiss’s previous one, Cold War. That was an exciting, atmospheric base-under-siege which managed to do something novel and interesting with a monster which was always going to take a bold writer to extract from the 1960s, in all its bulky, slow-moving, hissy-voiced beauty. The Ice Warriors weren’t really that interesting in this one. They had a new gun, the latest in Doctor Who’s growing catalogue of Interesting Alien Weapons, following the Zygons’ electric tumbleweed from last series. They also had a queen, the Ice Empress Iraxxa. I’m interested by the idea of an Ice Empress, but I found it difficult to take Iraxxa seriously when she seemed to be played for self-conscious pantomime up until the last two minutes of the episode. The screechy, comical voice that sounded too much like the Empress of the Racnoss didn’t help either.

It’s worth noting that Mark Gatiss is actually tremendously funny (he wrote Robot of Sherwood, after all, one of the all-time funniest Doctor Who episodes), and seems to have a very similar sense of humour to the Monty Python troupe. Empress of Mars unfortunately doesn’t feature the overtly silly public-schoolboy humour of Monty Python and Ripping Yarns, but there’s definitely a cheekiness and a mirth in the way it makes the quasi-comical Victorian soldiers throw dash-its and tally-hoes and old-boys back and forth, and the way it makes the British look terrifically and resolutely domesticated, not to mention hopelessly class-conscious, even marooned on Mars. It felt like Mark Gatiss was having fun when he wrote this, and it was fun.

It’s worth saying where I might put Empress of Mars in a ranking of Gatiss’s episodes. Of the nine episodes Gatiss has written for Doctor Who since 2005, I think I’d put it somewhere on the bottom end of that list, probably between Victory of the Daleks and The Idiot’s Lantern, making it seventh out of nine. The delightfully funny and fun Robot of Sherwood would go at the top. It’s worth comparing it to other Gatiss episodes because Gatiss’s scripts have always been a bit different from other present-day Doctor Whos. Gatiss doesn’t shoot straight down the middle. His scripts are offbeat, a bit quirky, a bit left-of-field. Carnivorous sentient televisions, animate dollhouses, robot occupations of 13^th Century Nottinghamshire, and Victorian soldiers on the Red Planet. Imagine Mark Gatiss as showrunner. It’d be weird and unpredictable. Probably more shit more often than Doctor Who is now, but at least it wouldn’t be boring.

For all the glorious unconventionality of the idea of putting Victorian soldiers in an Ice Warrior hive on Mars and making them fight each other, this episode actually holds back on the quirkiness and weirdness that usually characterises Gatiss episodes. It’s actually a fairly conventional narrative when you compare it to the rest of Gatiss’s playlist on Doctor Who, and fairly conventional Doctor Who, at that. And I’m not sure that it really worked. There’s nothing conspicuously wrong with it – it’s enjoyable enough. But it was, as the kids say, just ‘meh’. Gatiss’s episodes are weird. That’s what Gatiss does, and does well. I basically regard Sleep No More as peak Gatiss—it was the weirdest Gatiss has ever gone, and it was a triumph, a flawed triumph, but a triumph nonetheless. Admittedly plenty of people didn’t like it. But the one thing no one can dispute about that one is that it was memorable—you’re never going to forget it. You can’t really say the same about Empress of Mars. And that’s its problem. Gatiss compromised on doing what he does best in order to get all his favourite characters onscreen at the same time, and ended up producing a story that was indulgent and high-concept, but just a bit boring. It felt conspicuously like a filler episode, something every filler episode should want to avoid.

Rating: 6/10.

Thoughts on: World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls

The world didn’t end in this finale. The world didn’t come remotely close to ending. There was no apocalyptic threat to Earth, the universe, time or the human race. No reality bomb, no cracks in time, no return of the Time War, no pestilential Dalek swarms, not even a mythical universe-devouring Hybrid. There were a dozen and a half farmers in a homestead on a farm on the 507^th floor of a spaceship stuck in the gravitational pull of a black hole. No one knew they were there, no one would miss them, and it wouldn’t matter to the universe if they were absorbed into the ranks of a newly-minted Cyberman army, or died. They were no one. The Cybermen almost certainly wouldn’t be able to get off the ship anyway, without being sucked into a black hole. Everyone on that ship was doomed. It was only a matter of time. None of them mattered.

It’s an interesting choice of setting for Steven Moffat’s last ever finale. Just compare it with his predecessor. Russell T Davies went as big as he possibly could in his last finale. The end of all reality at the hands of the Daleks. He brought back every companion from his four (going on five) years’ time as showrunner and delivered what remains probably the most high-stakes and epic finale since Doctor Who came back in 2005. This isn’t like that. This is nothing like that. This is deliberately as low-key and low-stakes as possible. It’s literally the Doctor holed up on a farm defending a handful of unimportant inbred farmers against an unstoppable army of Cybermen, who are almost certainly going to die whatever he does and, in any case, whose whole world is doomed.

But actually, that’s the whole point. The choice is very, very deliberate on Moffat’s part. And, frankly, it’s the only appropriate way Moffat could have ended his tenure. Moffat has done the big, epic, high-stakes finales. He’s done the end of the universe and/or reality – four times, by my count (two of those times more explicitly). No doubt he could have done it again, and done it more convincingly and more spectacularly than it’s ever been done on the show before, by him or anybody else. I believe, considering the form he’s been at the last couple of seasons, that he could have delivered the best Big Finale we’ve yet seen. But somehow, that wouldn’t have been right. It would have been reliably stunning, and the reviews would have raved, but it wouldn’t have been the right note on which to end Moffat’s tenure. Moffat isn’t about that. Never has been.

Because this was a love letter to Doctor Who and the Doctor, a tribute to the show and the character Moffat has been writing for twelve years, and which has been his life for the last seven years. Moffat likes to say, half-facetiously, that in his opinion the companion, not the Doctor, is the main character of this show, that the companion is the most important character in Doctor Who. It’s a silly idea, of course, but it’s a nice one, and it’s nice to look at the show that way. However, this finale shows that Moffat doesn’t really believe that. For Moffat, the character of the Doctor and what the Doctor represents is the beating heart of this show.

Because this finale was all about what the character of the Doctor represents, and what this show is about. The Doctor is the man who will die defending a handful of farmers from an unstoppable army of Cybermen because it’s right. The Doctor is the man who does what’s kind and good in the face of almost certain failure because it’s right. It didn’t need to be a planet or a species the Doctor was defending, let alone the universe. The Doctor will die for the sake a few inbred farmers because that’s who he is. You can practically condense Moffat’s conception of the character to: the Doctor is the man who always does what’s right. That speech Twelve delivered to the two Masters, one of the most genuinely moving and passionate ever delivered by an actor as the Doctor, and I think my new favourite, basically encapsulated the essence of how Moffat conceives of the character of the Doctor and what he represents. It’s Doctor Who in a verse of passionately-delivered prose, a loving salute to the Doctor and Doctor Who.

Practically everything in this two-part finale revolved around that compelling theme. The Doctor’s mission to turn Missy good, into someone like him, was symbolic of the idea that being the Doctor isn’t an inheritance or an instinct, nor either nature or nurture – it’s a choice. It’s the choice to do what’s right and good, always, in the face of insurmountable odds, in the face of certain failure, without hope, witness or reward. Those opining that the presence of the twain Masters in this finale, especially John Simm’s Master, was rather pointless and that they played something of an irrelevant and peripheral role in the story are wrong. Missy’s struggle, between following the Doctor and being the person the Doctor wanted her to be, and being the person she had always been, represented by John Simm’s Master, represented the idea that being the Doctor was a choice. That, in the end, Missy made the choice to follow the Doctor, where she was without hope, witness or reward, was a vindication of what the Doctor represents. Which makes it all the more tragic that the Doctor never found out that she turned to follow him.

I keep putting all this in terms of Moffat’s conception of the Doctor because there is more than one showrunner’s interpretation of the character. I say that this finale is the appropriate way for Moffat to end his tenure as showrunner because Moffat’s interpretation of the character, his conception of the Doctor and what the Doctor is about, has always been the central theme of his Doctor Who. The Fiftieth Anniversary special was the apotheosis of that vision. More relevantly, in the climax of the Series 8 finale the Twelfth Doctor stood in a graveyard with a Cyberman army at his command and made another speech to Missy which was the culmination of a whole series of angst-ridden rumination about what being the Doctor meant. Two series later there’s no equivocation, no sliver of doubt at all about what he, the Doctor, stands for – and, in a symbolic reversal of roles, it’s Missy who’s been undergoing angsty self-reflection all season, and the Doctor who’s offering her the climactic character-defining choice.

So it was only right that Moffat ended his run this way. It was only right that he made the Doctor’s final stand a symbolic embodiment of what the Doctor represents. He went down fighting in the most mundane and inconsequential of circumstances, where, for once, no one would have blamed him for high-tailing out of there. It would have made the most trivial of difference. But that’s why this was such a heroic fall for him, and it’s why it’s such an emphatic vindication of the character. He went down being the Doctor where no one would have blamed him for not being the Doctor. It made for a death scene as rousing and emotional as any we’ve seen yet. It rivals the Tenth Doctor’s “So much more” death scene in terms of its raw emotional punch. It’s definitely one for the ages.

Before I tie up this rambling, messy not-really-a-review, any discussion of this finale would be incomplete if it didn’t talk about Bill’s fate, so let’s just talk about that. Before I saw The Doctor Falls I was sort of, without really thinking about it, hoping that Bill would either die or remain a Cyberman. I’m of the school of thought which believes that death is as important a part of Doctor Who as life and the saving thereof. Life is not as treasured, and saving lives is not as warranting of celebration, if no one ever dies and the significance of death, by experiencing the death of characters we love, is never appreciated. Death is the other side of the coin to life, and the show cannot have one without the other. Although I made peace with Clara’s fate in Hell Bent, I think she should have died. It was the appropriate logical and emotional end for her character and for that Doctor-Companion relationship.

But Bill is not Clara, and her arc was not Clara’s arc. This was an instance where the appropriate end for the companion absolutely was that, against all odds, even if it meant being magically resurrected by the power of the tears of her immortal undead celestial water girlfriend, Bill should have lived, de-cyber-converted. It would have been a bleak and jarringly cynical note if Bill had not survived in a story about how the Doctor saves lives – if, in the Doctor’s last heroic stand, he had failed. Bill never deserved that, she didn’t ask for that – Clara did. I don’t care that Bill’s salvation at the hands of waterbending angel Heather makes absolutely no sense and I don’t understand it, that it’s sentimental and mawkish and that, even for Doctor Who, it taxes the ability to suspend disbelief. Actually, this is one of the rare instances where I would be unsatisfied if it weren’t all that. Because it’s the right ending and this is Doctor Who. And Doctor Who can and, in select instances such as these, should do anything to make the right ending happen.

I’m looking forward to this year’s joint Twelfth Doctor/First Doctor Christmas special. Seeing the First Doctor again in itself promises to be very special, and somehow very apt, given the numerous self-conscious analogies made over Capaldi’s run between his and Hartnell’s Doctors. But it also promises to be another rousing tribute to a central aspect of the show, given that this finale just ended with the Doctor furiously repressing his regeneration, adamant that he would not change. If I’m correct, it’s going to follow the Doctor struggling to reconcile two instincts, which represent two constants of this show. He has to change, he has to move on, to live: change is life – it’s who he is. But to live – that is, to change – is to die. The old him dies and the new him is born. Everything he was, everyone he loved and everything he felt is forgotten. The new man goes sauntering away as though the old man had never been. The Tenth Doctor in The End of Time touched on this these themes, but, if I’m right, it looks like we’re going to see a more intimate exploration of those themes in this year’s Christmas special, featuring, like a visitation from the Ghost of Christmas Past, a guest appearance from the Doctor’s past life. It should be fun. And emotional, always emotional.

So this wasn’t really a review as much as a messy commentary which I largely made up as I went along, mostly of my, frankly recklessly subjective interpretation of this finale’s themes. But these pieces aren’t explicitly intended to be conventional reviews anyway, which is why they’re called “Thoughts on” Doctor Who stories, not “Reviews”. They’re a space for me to ramble to my heart’s content on Doctor Who episodes and put an arbitrary and risibly subjective rating at the end. When they do cross into review territory, it’s usually when I don’t have anything original or interesting to say about an episode, or at least when I can’t be bothered to think of anything original or interesting to say.

But, if you hadn’t already guessed, I really liked this finale. I liked it a lot. Thematically, it was a triumph. That much I think I’ve expressed. This finale’s themes, and the success with which it executed them, were what absorbed me and excited me most about it. I’m not sure I can think of a finale which has been more thematically profound, and which has been more unabashedly a tribute to the show itself (apart from The Day of the Doctor, which doesn’t really count as it’s not a finale). For that it gets high marks. Otherwise the character writing and the acting was perfect, and Rachel Talalay’s direction was reliably magnificent. I’ve already praised World Enough and Time verbosely here, and I thought the story’s treatment of the Cybermen was perfect. I’m not sure this is a complaint, but The Doctor Falls felt a bit slow in the middle. Maybe it actually would have benefited from being cut down. That’s about it. This finale wasn’t perfect, but the best Doctor Whos rarely are. I’m not sure yet where exactly to put it in a ranking of the finales, but it would go somewhere near the top – possibly even the very top. Well done, Steven Moffat.

Rating: 10/10.