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.