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.

Pros and Cons of selling Doctor Who to Netflix

Should Doctor Who be sold to Netflix? Why not? Who doesn’t love Netflix? Everyone’s favourite online streaming service makes some great shows. Look me in the eye and tell me Stranger Things isn’t one the best TV shows of our time. Tell me The Crown is rubbish. That’s right, you can’t. So you’d agree that Doctor Who should be sold to Netflix, then?

Okay, maybe not. But it’s an argument worth having, and, even if there are no immediate plans to sell Doctor Who to Netflix, it’s not a completely far-fetched prospect that the BBC might cancel Doctor Who and leave it to be picked up by Netflix or Amazon or Hulu. There’s a volume of precedent for Netflix taking over shows from TV networks that didn’t want them anymore: see Designated Survivor, Lucifer, Black Mirror and Arrested Development. Although Netflix technically didn’t “take it over”, one that I’m particularly anticipating is the upcoming live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender remake announced this week.

So there’s always the possibility that Netflix might pick up the BBC’s flagship sci-fi programme, even if it is a remote possibility (at least from this side of Series 11). For the fun of exploring a hypothetical, though, I thought it might be interesting to examine the pros and cons of a possible future where the BBC has sold Doctor Who to Netflix.

Pros

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Pro: Selling Doctor Who might save it

Hard as it is to believe, TV networks do actually run out of money sometimes. They sometimes have to cancel big, popular shows because they’re too expensive to make. Most of the time, if a network is making a popular show, it’s making enough revenue from the show to keep it running. But the BBC is in a special position because it’s a public broadcaster which relies on public funding for much of its revenue, and also runs a diverse catalogue of TV and radio channels, a digital operation and worldwide channels, many of which are net revenue-consuming operations (rather than revenue-producing), eating up revenue from projects like Doctor Who that would otherwise keep all, or a good deal of the considerable revenue they produce for themselves.

In addition, in a political environment where the government is cutting funding of public services like the BBC, it would be surprising if the BBC wasn’t finding it increasingly difficult to make Doctor Who to a consistent standard. Sure, if the BBC was looking for fat to trim, Doctor Who definitely wouldn’t be one of the first things to go — but it’s by no means a far-fetched possibility that the BBC would find itself forced to cancel Doctor Who as an unfortunate casualty of public belt-tightening.

There’s also the very real possibility that the BBC would simply can Doctor Who because of ratings under-performance. That’s an even more likely scenario than the BBC cancelling Doctor Who because of financial difficulties. I’ll withhold judgment on exactly how likely a prospect that is until I’ve seen Series 11, but, as I said recently, Series 11 could be the series that makes or breaks Doctor Who for the foreseeable future.

In either case, a Netflix takeover could be the stroke of grace that delivers Doctor Who from being axed for a second time.

Pro: Doctor Who would get a bigger budget

The BBC has a great deal of money, but it’s money that’s spread very thinly over a large number of operations. As a result Doctor Who has never really been funded to the extent a fantastical show of Who’s ambitions demands. Even in the early years of New Who, the Doctor was still pottering around in quarries, running around disused warehouses and fighting toilet-plunger-wielding pepper pots. Doctor Who has looked and felt much more premium in recent seasons, but with more money to splash it could be so much better.

If Netflix were to take over Doctor Who, its budget would immediately increase significantly. Netflix has the money to make Doctor Who as a premium, big-budget sci-fi production on the scale of Stranger Things or The Crown or, apparently, the upcoming Avatar live-action adaptation (which certainly won’t be cheap). If Netflix were to snap up a high-profile, mass cult show like Doctor Who, you can be sure it would give it the lion’s share of its original content funding. Netflix ain’t going to miss the opportunity to milk something with the huge profile of Doctor Who for all it can, or at least make a solid attempt at it.

Pro: Doctor Who would be less preoccupied with politics

I would put this one in the “pro” column, at least. Whenever Doctor Who writers have something to say about their favourite political issue of the day, they never really make much of an effort to restrain themselves. The tendency of Who writers using their commissions as a platform for political commentary has heightened over the Capaldi era in particular. I’m grimly anticipating the inevitable Brexit episode in Series 11 (the long-awaited return of Peladon anyone?).

I’m not saying that Doctor Who should necessarily avoid politics. Doctor Who can, and has done political comment very successfully: Season 7 of the classic series stands out as an exemplar of this. And Who has always dabbled in politics to some extent. But when writers are primarily using their scripts to grandstand very tiresomely about politics rather than make good Doctor Who stories as frequently as they are now, it does just get a bit boring.

There’s no guarantee that if Netflix were to take over Doctor Who it would be any less tiresomely political than it is under the BBC, but I think, as the BBC is a public broadcaster that reports on politics as a news outlet, is affected by political decisions, and receives tax revenue, it feels that it has more freedom and obligation to comment on politics than would a private undertaking that has to keep a much closer eye on its profit margin.

There’s also the fact that Netflix would be seen to be a trustee of Doctor Who, a long-running show which is considered a British national institution, rather than its proprietor. In these circumstances Netflix is always going to be more closely scrutinised than the BBC for its running of Who, and would probably be accused of hijacking Doctor Who for its own agenda if it were to air excessively political episodes.

Pro: New ideas, new style

And, of course, selling Doctor Who to a completely different platform would inevitably inject the much-needed dose of freshness I’ve been saying it desperately needs. Different writers and producers means fresh ideas, fresh styles and a fresh creative vision. Can you imagine Peter Morgan, creator of The Crown, showrunning Doctor Who? Admittedly, it might be terrible, but in any event it would be unique and very different from the Doctor Who we’re used to (and — admit it — a bit bored with).

To be sure, there’s no guarantee that Doctor Who would necessarily get a fresh lick of paint if it were picked up by Netflix. Netflix might prefer to bring over the incumbent team of writers and producers rather than hire an all-new staff, especially as Doctor Who is a show that — I would guess — is very difficult to step into and start making unless you’ve had experience making it before. But at the same time, if Netflix is picking Doctor Who up after it was cancelled, it’s not likely going to want to keep employing the people responsible for getting it cancelled.

What happened the last time Americans got involved in making Doctor Who

Cons

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Con: Doctor Who would get a bigger budget

As much as a generous budget upsizing might make for a more premium, more polished and cinematic Doctor Who, I can also see a scenario where all of that might actually make for an inferior Who. That’s something that can be said about almost no other show, for the reason that Doctor Who has always been more than a bit naff, a bit camp, a bit self-consciously silly, and has always revelled in its conspicuous lack of budget. Toilet plunger wielding pepper pots, tinfoil Cybermen who like to croon “Excellent…”, robot dogs, Abzorbaloffs, bug-eyed Raxacoricofallapatorians: it’s all part of what makes Doctor Who what it is. Fans are unanimous that Abzorbaloff was an all-time nadir for Doctor Who, but I think we all, actually, quite like that Doctor Who is a show where something as utterly ridiculous as Abzorbaloff can run. There’s a good case for saying that something would be lost from Doctor Who if that wasn’t the case anymore.

Con: It would be Americanised

Arguably one of the biggest fears among Who fans about selling Doctor Who to Netflix or another (American) streaming service is that the show would lose something of its characteristic Britishness under the production of an American company. Remember the last time Americans made Doctor Who? It was really rubbish, and really American. Even if production of Doctor Who stays in Britain under an all-British team, there’s no saying that the American influence won’t work its way into the show to some extent. And there’s no saying that Who’s traditional bellicose cultural Britishness won’t be dialled back even by British writers and producers conscious that their paycheck comes from an American company and that the American share of the audience of a Netflix-made Doctor Who is inevitably going to enlarge significantly.

It’s hard to anticipate how far, exactly, Doctor Who’s Britishness would be compromised under Netflix, but I think it’s unavoidable to some extent. There are also some who would insist, on principle, that Doctor Who is a British national institution and therefore cannot be made by anyone other than the BBC. Doctor Who would not be Doctor Who if it were made by anyone other than the BBC, they say. I’m less convinced by this point of view, even if I agree that Who is a cultural icon that should stay British in character. But certainly, for many fans, Doctor Who being made by Americans would be a bad thing in principle.

Con: Netflix wouldn’t understand Doctor Who

There’s a degree of overlap between this point and the last, but they’re not quite the same. Because even if Doctor Who’s Britishness was preserved under Netflix production, Netflix could still just get Doctor Who wrong. This is where Netflix trying to make Doctor Who as a premium, cinematic, serious sci-fi show might fail (as much as I’d like to see someone try that). Netflix might try to make a big-budget, premium Doctor Who in the same vein as Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica, but in the process of doing so might lose sight of the fact that Doctor Who is, at heart, very much not a serious show, but, reflecting its intrinsic Britishness, a very self-consciously un-serious one.

There are other ways Netflix could misfire by making a version of Doctor Who that fundamentally misunderstands the show. It could, at the other extreme, make a Doctor Who that’s too soap operatic and humany-wumany. It could get the Doctor-Companion dynamic wrong. It could misconstrue the central themes of the show. It could pitch the show too aggressively at one sector of the audience (children, teenage fangirls, grown-up male Gallifrey Base-lurking über-fans) and neglect the others. All ways in which Netflix could cook up something that most fans would fail to recognise as the same show as the Doctor Who they know.

In conclusion

At present, the prospect of Doctor Who being sold to Netflix is pretty remote. There’s no immediate danger of the BBC cancelling Who or selling it off. If the remote became real, though, and Doctor Who did become the next Netflix Original™, there are clearly advantages and disadvantages to how that would play out. For my part, I want Doctor Who to stay in the BBC’s hands, where it belongs. But, at the same time, I think I’d be comfortable with the BBC selling Doctor Who to Netflix if it was forced to. Let me put it this way: I don’t want Doctor Who to be sold to Netflix if it can be avoided, but I’d be interested in watching a Netflix-made Who, and I recognise that Netflix proprietorship of the show might improve it in certain ways — most importantly, Netflix can give Doctor Who a much bigger budget than the BBC can.

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What do you think? Is a Netflix-made Doctor Who heresy? Or do you want Doctor Who out of the BBC’s hands as fast as possible? What other pros and cons are there to Netflix taking over Doctor Who?

Whither Sherlock?

Warning: spoilers for The Final Problem.

(My belated review of The Final Problem will be posted soon—I’m doing a Sherlock marathon at the moment and I’m going to write the review when I get to TFP 🙂 )

So the long-awaited fourth series of Sherlock has come and gone in a whirlwind of suspense, emotion, anticipation and controversy and it’s hard to believe, given how long the wait was, that it’s all already over. If nothing else, Series 4 was a feast for the fandom, an indulgent three weeks of event television lapped up by the fans which, for three suspenseful weeks, sent us into a frenzy of speculation and furious discussion.

Certainly Series 4 was divisive, and those in the Sherlock fandom on the Tumblrs or the Twitters would know that The Final Problem sort of triggered an all-out fandom war on those platforms. But even those whose yardstick of a quality series of Sherlock is how much time John and Sherlock spend kissing, and were thus disappointed by Series 4, would have to (reluctantly) admit that Series 4 was probably the most ambitious and momentous series yet. Mary got killed off, after her lurid backstory was revealed; the secret third Holmes sibling was introduced; and the hidden secrets of Sherlock’s past, Sherlock’s “origin story”, so to speak, were revealed.

There’s a reason, maybe, that Series 4 was so big and ambitious. It’s been seven years, four series, and who knows how long in-story. The characters have developed in leaps and bounds and the narrative itself has come such a long way. Dragons have been fought and slain, and the characters have faced enough challenges and had enough adventures for a couple of lifetimes. Series 4 ended with a sense of completeness that wasn’t present at the end of any of the previous series, as though Sherlock and John’s stories have been told; there’s nothing left to say—the montage at the end of TFP communicated it all: they continue solving crimes, fighting bad guys, enjoying their dangerous, unconventional lives, being best friends and raising John and Mary’s child together. Moriarty is gone, Magnussen is gone, Irene Adler is safe, Eurus is tamed. Sherlock, through the friendships and relationships he’s formed since we first met him in A Study in Pink, most of all through John, is a better, stronger person, a “good man”, as Lestrade affectionately admitted at the end of TFP. There’s no more to say.

Indeed, that montage seemed to convey the writers’ sentiments that this may well be the last word on Sherlock and John—the end of Sherlock’s story, or at least the end of Sherlock’s story worth making into the cinematic event television that Sherlock is. The writers and the actors have speculated that this might be the end of Sherlock, and with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman’s professional lives increasingly busy, there might not even be the opportunity to keep making more seasons of Sherlock from now on. It’s Cumberbatch and Freeman’s willingness and availability to do Sherlock, after all, that determines if and when the show gets made, although Moffat and Gatiss have said that they would not be opposed to making more Sherlock if there’s a good enough idea and everyone wants to do it. The problem is finding an idea for more Sherlock good enough to justify making it, a difficult prospect when Series 4 felt so final.

I’ll agree that if Sherlock were to end now, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad place to end it. And I’ll agree that it would be a hard ask to find an idea worth making into Series 5. But there’s clearly a hunger in, I’d say, the majority of the fandom for more Sherlock. There’s a feeling that this show could still do more and that there’s still more to tell in the story of Sherlock and John. That’s the way I feel, I think. No, I wouldn’t be disappointed if Series 4 were to be the end of Sherlock, but I feel that it doesn’t have to be, and that the show could still do more. I only say Sherlock shouldn’t need to end because I love it so much, and because I think if something is good, if something is working, and if you love it as much as the fans and everyone involved in Sherlock loves Sherlock, then there’s no need for it to end until it really has to. I don’t think Sherlock needs to end. At least not yet.

Moffat and Gatiss have said they would love to see Sherlock and John grow old together. I think I remember reading that either Benedict or Martin said they wanted to grow old with the characters. Why not? Here’s a concept: Series 1-4 are Chapter 1 of the story of Sherlock and John. Chapters 2, 3, 4 etc. are still to be told. That might mean we don’t see Sherlock and John again until the time is right. Let the show rest, give the characters and the narrative time and space to grow and develop offscreen, and come back to them in, say, eight years, and the show will be new again. The characters will be different people in a new and different stage in their lives. Sherlock will be closer to the more familiar, wiser, older, more venerable Sherlock Holmes of Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett. The events of Series 1-4 will be an increasingly distant memory, and the show would not be a continuation of the storylines of Series 1-4 as much as an entirely new chapter in the narrative, even a soft reboot of sorts.

It doesn’t have to involve making progressive series of the show, as the show has done for the first seven years of its life. I would be happy with a special every couple of years which revisits the characters at appropriate intervals and show Sherlock and John growing and aging—straight crime-solving stories in the nature of The Hounds of Baskerville or A Study in Pink rather than the arc-heavy material that has dominated the show in Series 3 and 4: vintage Sherlock. That said, I really like the idea of doing a full series of Sherlock in the future by way of a big, multi-episode story similar to what Torchwood did in Children of Earth if the writers can find a good enough idea (and I’ve no doubt they can).

If there is to be no more Sherlock, though, if Series 4 is to be the end of Sherlock forever, then of course I’m happy with what the show has been and what everyone involved in the show has given us over the last seven years, and I feel privileged to have been part of this fandom when Sherlock was being made. Sherlock really is an extraordinary show, and I’ve no hesitation at all in calling it some of the best-made television ever. It’s given us some of the finest moments in television history, some of the most thrilling screenplays ever, and we, as fans, really can’t ask for more. It’s undoubtedly become a cultural icon, and is arguably the most iconic screen adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories ever (it’s certainly my favourite, and I’ve seen all the Jeremy Brett episodes). I’ll be sad to see it go, but happy to have had it at all. Everyone involved in Sherlock should be immensely proud of what they’ve made, including us, the fans, who’ve made the Sherlock fandom one of the most fun, energetic and invigorating to be part of.

So thank you, Sherlock. Thanks for the memories, and an emphatic and heartfelt goodbye—but hopefully not yet.

Class: Nightvisiting

 

Warning: spoilers.

Now this is more like it. This is the kind of intelligent, thematic, high-concept storytelling I was looking forward to from Class. It’s a welcome sign that Class will not feel itself constrained by its YA-ish concept and premise, that it will dare to experiment and test itself and try out interesting ideas. It’s learning from the experiences of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures in this way, both of which played it fairly conventional and safe in their first seasons before becoming more innovative and bold, and therefore interesting, in subsequent seasons. Class looks like it’s skipping the “play-it-safe” part and is eager to try out the interesting ideas of its writers without unnecessary ado. That’s very satisfying.

And the idea behind Nightvisiting really is interesting, and the show ought to be congratulated not only for having the initiative to try it out but also for executing it so successfully. The idea of people’s deceased loved ones coming back and visiting them in the night is on a special level of freaky, a level I’m really pleased that Class is prepared to play on. Not only that, but the way this concept was brought to life was utterly freaky. Jasper, Tanya’s father (or rather, the Lankin imitating Jasper) was a profoundly creepy and unnerving figure. He was positively ghoulish, with his dead gaze and his moaning voice. It’s the kind of thing intended to scare adults as well as children—children are easily scared by ghosts and zombies, but adults will be scared by the idea of their deceased loved ones appearing at their windows as ghouls like Tanya’s father. It’s what makes the idea of the Lankin so wonderfully frightening even after being stripped of its supernatural affectations—no one wants to find their dead father, girlfriend or sister sitting at their window, ghost or not.

Another strength of this episode is the character writing, which is, as I thought, turning out to be this show’s standout feature. Tanya was not reduced to a passive plot device by being tempted by the Lankin’s deception. She was written consistently with her character’s perceptiveness, intuitiveness and emotional strength by remaining aloof and sceptical of her “father’s” overtures, notwithstanding her grief and her obvious desire to connect with her father again, even if her defences did begin to melt eventually. A weaker and less perceptive person would have given in to the Lankin, as we saw. And Vivian Oparah delivers some exceptional, absorbing acting to vindicate her character’s writing, the moment in the denouement where Tanya channels all her resentment and anger at her father into the Lankin especially stirring.

Moreover, it’s a welcoming sign of Ram’s emotional growth and healing that his first reaction to seeing Rachel again, over whom he was grieving intensely in the previous episode, was to go “NOPE NOPE NOPE” and run to find his dad—and, failing that, April. It’s a gratifying development from the “Nobody understands my pain, I’m shutting everyone out, just let me wallow” that we saw from Ram in the previous episode. Ram is quickly becoming the show’s most interesting character, even if he still is a bit of a twat, and I’m very intrigued to see where his character will end up by the end of this season.

And, oh my god, let’s talk about April. There’s an emotional strength and depth of character there we would never have guessed in the first episode, April revealing the hidden emotional turmoil that we now see defines much of her character. It’s an absorbing and touching revelation scene that sees April and Ram bond in, er, more ways than one. Who the hell saw that kiss coming? I’m not criticising—it was unexpected but it does actually make sense. April’s explanation of the way she puts up defences against the inner turmoil surrounding her father in order to stop her father continuing to hold influence over her and control her life speaks to Ram, who’s trying to recover from the trauma and the suffering he’s recently experienced. They bond on a very intimate, emotional level over their shared experiences with trauma and coping, and, in the passion of the moment, kiss. It works. It was a gamble which, although it could have failed badly with worse writing, actually worked out well.

Even Miss Quill is — slowly — becoming more layered, even if she’s still the show’s single-note comic relief at the moment—not that I’m necessarily complaining. I’m thinking particularly of the scene at the end where Miss Quill appears to express her disgust at the kids’ sentimental post-victory bonding session before stalking off, but, was it just me, or did it seem like Miss Quill was just a tiny bit disappointed that she wasn’t included in the kids’ celebrations? I think she does long for real personal connection like Charlie has found with the others, even if on some level she does resent the “arses of smart” she’s been charged with looking after. What else are we to make of Miss Quill’s insistence that she’s “deranged with grief” for her people, and her disbelief in Charlie’s apparent aloofness? If the show continues to write its characters well, we’ll see much more of Miss Quill before the season is over.

Rating: 8/10.

Class: The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo

Eh. I guess every new show has its misfires—especially one as experimental and innovative as Class. When I say “misfire”, I don’t mean that it was awful. It was fine. Just fine. It holds up. But it doesn’t particularly impress. It’s just “meh”.  Don’t get me wrong, there were a couple of really great moments in there, moments which, for me, vindicate my excitement about this show and my belief in its potential. But the script as a whole falls a bit flat because, at base, it just wasn’t that interesting a story.

The monster, I felt, was poorly conceived and did not make for a particularly interesting plot. I got the impression that the episode was making up for the lack of engaging plotting that could be wrung out of the dragon-tattoo-monster by saturating the episode with gratuitous gore. Yes, I felt the gore was excessive; this may be a mature show, and some level of gore and horror is expected in a show like this, but on this occasion I think it traversed into the territory of vulgarity and detracted from the story. Furthermore, the episode’s denouement was confusing and felt very artificial. It was clearly supposed to represent the culmination of Ram’s emotional development over the course of the episode (which is why I say it felt artificial), but it was so contrived that, having watched the episode twice now, I’m still not quite sure what happened in that scene.

Where this episode did well, though, was as a character piece about Ram Singh. You’ve got to feel for this boy. When we first met him he was, let’s be honest, a twat, but God he’s been put through some horrific trials in the intervening two episodes. It’s so unfortunate that he’s had to go through all that, but for better or worse it’s brought out the person Ram is inside, who’s clearly a person of great passion and feeling and sensitivity. He’s not just the arrogant football jock we took him for at the beginning of the first episode, it’s beginning to become more clear now that that’s a front he puts on. He obviously had deep feelings for his girlfriend as his (very well written) emotional turmoil in this episode showed. Moreover, in his insecurity about not being able to play football we learned that his connection to football is very much an emotional connection—football is inextricably part of his identity and his self-worth, which is why it means so much to him that he can start playing again. In this way the final scene between Ram and his father was beautiful, just astoundingly well-written and exactly the encouraging, hopeful note this episode should have ended upon.

Moreover, I’m really liking the budding Ram-Tanya relationship. They’re two such very different people whom you’d think unlikely ever to form any kind of meaningful relationship, but Tanya seems like the only person Ram can talk to and open up to about his feelings and insecurities. I find their relationship really, genuinely interesting and I anticipate that this—character writing and relationships—will be one of Class‘s greatest strengths. I already love all the characters and the character writing has been exceptional across the board so far. Even Miss Quill, definitely one of my favourite things about this show, who continues to be simultaneously hilarious as the show’s comic relief and really, really interesting as an enigmatic alien character with a mostly hidden backstory.

You can’t necessarily blame a young, energetic new show like Class for its misfires. I didn’t expect the whole of the first series to be amazing, or even good. It’s still feeling its way forward, testing its strength, figuring out what it wants to be and what it’s good at. Both good and bad is bound to come out of this process and, to be fair, this isn’t bad at all. It’s certainly enjoyable enough and has its moments of brilliance. It’s not nearly as unfortunate as what came out of Doctor Who’s early days of experimentation (you know the episode I’m talking about). I just hope that in coming episodes we’re going to see the brilliant as well as the “meh”.

Rating: 6/10.

Class: For Tonight We Might Die

Warning: spoilers.

I’ll state my verdict of Class’s opening episode at the outset: I think it’s a really promising start to a show whose concept has simultaneously been met with mixed feelings by fans and heaped with fairly high expectations. I was not among those who felt disappointed by the announcement that Class was going to be the new Doctor Who spinoff (as opposed to… I’m not sure exactly), but my expectations of the show were pretty high, if only because of how excited I was. While we’ve only seen the first two episodes so far so it’s too early to tell yet, I think what we’ve seen has shown that Class is a show with enormous promise and potential. It has a cast of really interesting characters and talented actors as well as great intelligence and creativity in its writing. It feels a little bit like Torchwood’s early days at the moment — not completely sure of its direction or purpose — but the potential is definitely there for it to be a fantastic new sci-fi drama.

I think what I’m most excited about, just from these first two episodes, is the cast of wonderful characters. I can see that a great deal of thought and care was put into assembling this lineup of characters, writing them and casting the actors to play them. Each one of them is interesting and engaging and each one of them is a character I’m really excited to get to know better. There’s so much potential for character development for each of them, and to that end we’ve already seen some meaningful development with Ram, “the boy who hears applause every time he enters a room”, undergoing horrific trauma in just the first episode (not to mention the second). The events of the first episode have brought all our main characters together in what is no doubt the foundation of an involving group dynamic along the lines of Buffy, Torchwood, Pretty Little Liars (take your pick). For my own part, I think my favourite character is April. She’s sweet and endearing, but there’s a toughness and depth there as well, and something tells me she’s going to have a fairly big role to play as the story develops.

We can see that the show is definitely testing its strengths and trying to figure out what it is in just this first episode. We know for sure now, despite the innocuous title Class, that this is definitely not a kids’ show. It’s not just that the level of violence and gore and, as I have a suspicion we’ll see in coming episodes, sexual content is inappropriate for the children who enjoy Doctor Who, it’s also that kids just wouldn’t find Class interesting. It’s a mature show dealing with mature themes. I suspect that we’ll find that the show’s focus will be less on the monsters than on the character drama, the monsters perhaps serving as instruments and metaphors for the characters’ emotional struggles, development and coming-of-age, much like in Buffy.

Perhaps that’s why, ironically, the aspects of the show which seem like they’ve received the least attention and thought are the pure science fiction elements—the monsters and the sci-fi lore (concerning Charlie and Miss Quill’s backstory). The “Shadowkin”, for example, I found quite uninventive and lame. But I appreciate that this is a premiere episode and it’s more about introducing the characters and setting up the series than telling a riveting story in its own right, so I hope that more consideration will be given to the sci-fi side of the show in coming episodes.

Also somewhat ironically, I think the Doctor’s guest sequence was one of the weaker points of this episode, just because when the Doctor arrived it suddenly turned from a Class episode into a Doctor Who episode, in the sense that the writing completely changed. It’s obvious the two shows have quite different tones, so the key-change felt slightly jarring. All the suspense and the drama the scene had built up was suddenly broken when the Doctor turned up and proceeded to crack jokes as though this were the cheap comedy episode of a Doctor Who series. The menacing figures of the Shadowkin suddenly looked like the lame and slightly comical CGI objects of the Doctor’s PG-13 comedy. That’s not to make any criticism of Peter Capaldi, who was as good as ever in the role, just that I’d like to have seen the Doctor written in a tone appropriate for this show.

As an aside, does anyone else get the feeling that Miss Quill is being written as the Whoniverse’s answer to the female Doctor controversy? It certainly looks like she’s being set up that way, given the way she’s been put into the role of defending the Earth with her young companions charges, and defending it without weapons in true Doctor-ish style. I have no complaints because I think Miss Quill is amazing, one of the best things about this show, and I’m excited to see more of her.

Anyway, that’s my verdict of Class‘s debut. A little weak in spots, not completely sure of what it’s supposed to be yet (although it has some very exciting ideas), but it’s a debut which reveals enormous promise and potential, which hopefully it will prove itself equal to capitalising upon. It’s a show we should all be excited about.

Rating: 8/10.