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 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.

Interesting news about Chris Chibnall’s plans for Doctor Who

From Radio Times yesterday:

It looks like new Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall is set to shake up the long-running sci-fi drama when he takes over at the end of the year.

In an interview with Television, the in-house magazine of the Royal Television Society, Chibnall says that all options are on the table for the programme, including a whole-series storyline of the kind he pursued on three series of Broadchurch.

Asked if this approach were possible, he replied “yes”, adding that “what the BBC was after was risk and boldness” when they approached him for the job.

Admitting that he resisted accepting the role “for a very long time”, Chibnall said the BBC had agreed with his ideas for the show – somewhat to his surprise.

“I had ideas about what I wanted to do with it,” he said. “When I went to them and said, ‘This is what I would do’, I actually expected them to say, ‘Ooh, let’s talk about that’, but they said: ‘Great!’”

Interviewer Mark Lawson writes in the same piece: “Chibnall’s general tone suggests that there may be a radical revamp of Doctor Who, which will please those who have suggested the show needs a kick up the Tardis.”

I’ll be writing my review of The Empress of Mars soon–probably tonight if all goes well–but I just wanted to comment briefly on this very interesting bit of news about Chris Chibnall’s plans for Doctor Who post 2017.

Basically, Chibnall appears to be toying with plans for a radical shake-up of Doctor Who’s format when he takes over. There’s a reference to the possibility of a series-long storyline à la Broadchurch in the article–which would be radical indeed, and if Chibnall is considering that, then it’s a pretty good indication that anything is possible for Series 11. Even more interestingly, it looks like the BBC is totally on board with any radical revamping of the show Chibnall is proposing to undertake.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is some of the most exciting Doctor Who news we’ve heard in a long time–and yes, that includes the return of John Simm and the Mondasian Cybermen. I was literally only thinking yesterday about how the best thing Chibnall could do for the show, other than produce great stories, would be to shake up the format. I actually didn’t think it was likely to happen, but an iconoclastic overhaul is exactly what the show needs right now.

I hate to say it, but as brilliant as the Capaldi era has been, at least for us diehards, the thing is just getting a bit stale. A bit passé. I was reflecting on that in my review of Extremis, where I struggled to be enthused by what was undoubtedly one of the boldest and most boundary-pushing episodes we’ve seen on Who. That the show has been sticking to the formula Russell T Davies employed when he brought it back in 2005 has a lot to do with that. Sure, there have been stylistic changes along the way–Moffat in particular has cycled through as many stylistic shifts as he’s done seasons–and the character of the fanbase has changed in tandem, but on the whole Doctor Who in 2017 remains the same show it was in 2005. And I think if it stayed that way any longer we’d all, even us diehards, get bored of it and it would get cancelled.

So, yes, the show needs to change to survive, and more than to survive, to remain interesting. The experience of the show’s first cancellation should be instructive: by 1989 the show had become repetitive, had become boring, had lost viewers, and was canned. The changes need to involve more than more two-parters or extending the format to 60 minutes (although both would be welcome changes). The experiment with a three-part story in the Monk trilogy was a welcome venture, even if that storyline rather flopped. The idea of a Broadchurch-style series-long storyline is even better.

I think I’d also want to see a major stylistic shift under Chibnall. Moffat made a significant stylistic shift away from Davies’ familiar (and relatively consistent) style when he took over in 2010, and has moved even further away from Davies’ style since then, but by and large the show still looks much like it did in 2005, and a casual viewer wouldn’t necessarily be able to distinguish between the two. Just compare televised Doctor Who to the audio Doctor Who Big Finish is making to discern how little the show has actually changed since 2005. Doctor Who is still by and large a soap opera clothed in science-fiction garb, admittedly with more emphasis on the science-fiction bit now than in 2005. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but after 12 years it’s starting to feel stale. It’s hard to get consistently large numbers of people excited about the same thing you’ve been making for 12 years.

Doctor Who should feel fresh again. Series 11 should be a reboot in every sense except continuity. Series 11 should feel like 2005 again, not stylistically but in the sense of freshness and newness, in the sense that you’re seeing an old, familiar show totally remade into a new one. In 2005 the rebranded, revamped Doctor Who captured the attention of a nation–and it can do so again if it successfully does what it’s always been good at, and changes, regenerates.

I was starting to feel uneasy about the prospect of Chibnall as showrunner, given his indication that he was going to throw out all the current writers (even Mathieson and Dollard)–and I’m still uneasy about Chibnall on this front–but he’s just given me a very good reason to be excited about Series 11.